
Class _^'J\_.Xa*^ 

Book. ^\U:^ 

Gopyriglit]^'" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 

/ 



JOHN MITCHELL 



The Wage Earner 

and His Problems 



JOHN MITCHELL 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 

; PUBLISHED BY P. S. RIDSDALE 

1913 






0^ 



Copyright, 1913, by 

P. S. RIDSDALE 

FOR JOHN MITCHELL 



Printed by 

National Capital Press, Inc. 

Washington, D, C. 



©CI.A346725 



FOREWORD 

No one can doubt but that the reading habit is 
firmly established among the American people. 
We read and we read — at home, on the street, in 
the street car, on the train, in places of work ; we 
read as we eat, as we talk, as we walk, as we wait. 
Daily we consume tons and tons of printed matter. 

This reading habit of ours is of vital signifi- 
cance and effect in determining what we are and 
what we would be. When first we enter the world 
of books by the road of the a, b, c's, we come into 
a wider and greater world of realities and a realm 
of imagery. Beginning in childhood with the 
fairy-land and the make-believe, we may go fur- 
ther and further into the world of books and 
thought, and may there find and know men and 
women — all that they were or dreamed, or strove 
and agonized to be. In that world mind calls 
unto mind across all ages, the great and noble of 
all times speak simply and clearly to anyone who 
will hear, truths of life and work, truths born 
of experience and wisdom ; and yet do all Ameri- 
cans realize that this reading habit is the talisman 
that admits them to communion and companion- 
ship with the immortals ? Or is the talisman pros- 
tituted to less worthy purposes ? 

They tell us that Americans read more news- 



4 THE WAGE EAENEES 

papers than any other form of literature, and 
that periodicals rank next in popularity. The 
modern American newspaper is something which 
is generally looked upon as an achievement — ■ 
morning editions, noon editions, evening editions, 
Sunday paper, and extra editions whenever nec- 
essary to inform the public of the latest happen- 
ings. These do indeed serve a purpose, and, as a 
rule, serve it well. Daily they bring to the read- 
ers, whether in the city or in the remotest habita- 
tions, such happenings of the whole world as 
editors and reporters deem of greatest moment. 
They reflect the outward manifestation of the 
sweep and scope of world action. The papers and 
the periodicals not only chronicle events, but com- 
ment on the force and the trend of related move- 
ments. Valuable as is the function of this read- 
ing matter, yet it is, and is intended to be, only 
ephemeral. It deals largely with the superficial 
aspects and phases of life, with that which is sen- 
sational, adventitious and abnormal, and not with 
the underlying, fundamental forces of life, thought 
and action. Those whose reading is confined to 
this sort of material miss the treasures of liter- 
ature, — the great books which tell of life with its 
suffering and its joy, its pain and its hope, its 
struggles and its visions of greater things beyond. 
There are books written in red blood, books that 
bring you close to the throbbing heart of all 
humanity and reveal to you the imperishable force 



FOEEWOED 5 

of personality, books that bring yon into tnne with 
the mnsic of the universe and the sonl-life and 
purposes that shape and mold the course of human 
development. These are the books of inspiration 
and life, these are what should be read and re- 
read, these are they which live and bring their 
message to men of all ages. 

Not many of us realize how much we owe to 
the books that we read — they constitute our chief 
source from which to acquire information. 
Largely from what we read we build up our 
mental world which determines or is the self and 
the will to action, we fashion our precepts and 
concepts, our mental tools and our ideals. What- 
ever it is our custom to read is that which fixes 
the tone of our mental existence, determines our 
sympathies and our interpretations of men and 
life. 

Centuries ago it was written ^^of making 
many books there is no end." Today as then, 
there are books written by the vain and the 
foolish, by those of little understanding. These 
last but a brief while and then vanish into the 
void of time. There are others written by men 
who told of things which were lasting and funda- 
mental, and who dealt with bed-rock truths and 
the eternal verities. These were men who had 
been fired by life's dreams and purposes, whose 
suffering and experiences made them more keenly 
sensitive to the passions of humanity. They were 



6 THE WAGE EAENEES 

seers who could interpret life, who could enricli 
others by the wealth of their experiences and 
enter into every mind and life, and inspire by 
their coming. Through their books we are granted 
the privilege of communion with these leaders of 
all ages, of sensing their personalities and under- 
standing their characters, of grasping the mean- 
ing and import of that imperishable personality 
which is gathered from the forces of all the ages 
that have gone before, and shall live in all the 
ages that are to come. These are the books that 
shall live and never die; they deal with human 
life, its depths and its shallows. Those which tell 
of life, human efforts and aspirations are what 
may with profit constitute the reading matter of 
all our people that they may understand and 
appreciate the world in which they live and the 
lives of all among whom they dwell that the com- 
mon life may be uplifted to a thing of joy and un- 
limited development. 

When we see in the common life the joy and the 
purpose of living, whei^ all can find there the 
opportunity for the realization of the best and the 
greatest in each individual, then there will come 
into the life of the whole nation an understanding 
that will bless and glorify the work that is done 
by each and all. A book that interprets the 
motives and the purpose of a movement that meets 
a vital human need, that in familiar terms tells the 



FOREWORD 7 

ignorant, the heedless and the isolated, why that 
movement is what it is, is a book that will do a 
part in creating and fashioning the forces of na- 
tional thought and action. Of such a character 
is this book by John Mitchell. 

Washington, D. C, 

February 21st, 1913. 

SAMUEL GOMPERS 
President, American Federation of Labor 



CONTENTS. 



FoBEwoED By Samuel Gompers 

CHAPTER Page 
I. The Wage Earners and Labor Organ- 
izations - 11 

II. The Wage Earners and Immigration 29 

III. The Wage Earners and Compensa- 

tion FOR Industrial Accidents 42 

IV. The Wage Earners and Industrial. 

Efficiency 59 

V. The Wage Earners and the Ju- 
diciary 74 

VI. The Wage Earners and the Minimum 

Wage for Women and Children 90 

VII. The Wage Earners and the Trusts^ 105 
VIII. The Wage Earners and Unemploy- 
ment 117 

IX. The Wage Earners and Prison 

Labor 132 

X. The Wage Earners — ^Union and 

Non-Union 146 

XL The Wage Earners and the Social 

Uplift 158 

XIL The Wage Earners and the Em- 
ployers 172 



CHAPTER L 

THE WAGE EAKNERS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS. 

In November of each year, at some one of the 
large cities, the convention of the American Fed- 
eration of Labor is held, continuing in session for 
about two weeks. The press dispatches from day 
to day relative to the transactions of the delegates 
to these conventions may be expected to contain 
news so varied in character, if we are to judge by 
the past, that the general reader will be puzzled by 
them, or perhaps pleased or vexed, accordingly as 
he may be imperfectly informed as to what it is 
all about, or shall have his prepossessions con- 
firmed or his prejudices aroused. Our friends the 
reporters present will seize the points which in 
their judgment may interest their respective news- 
papers. Hence, in the pictures certain of them 
will paint, there may be, — once in a while, — a pre- 
ponderance of black color, if the taste of their 
readers is for black, and contrariwise as to white. 
In either case, or even when colorless news matter 
is sent out perfunctorily day by day, the news- 
paper reports are usually fragmentary. Besides, 
seeing a new set of facts just as they are, uncol- 
ored by one 's own eyes, is a point in efficiency not 
always developed even among observers drilled by 
the most modern scientific reportorial methods. 



12 THE WAGE EARNEES 

Hence, the reader is often left uncertain on many- 
matters relating to convention legislation as well 
as to trade union aims and tendencies. 

For such, reasons, on the suggestion of various 
sympathizers with the truth for the employer as 
well as for the wage earner, I am going to offer in 
these pages something of fact and something of 
opinion bearing on labor questions of the day. I 
may help readers in general to familiarize them- 
selves with the work of organized labor, not only 
at conventions but all the year round. These 
observations are not to relate to any of the purely 
organization questions at present in controversy, 
but rather to the larger social problems which the 
trade unions are having their share in trying to 
solve and on which the majority of active union 
men are in accord. These discussions are not to 
be attempts at formal essays or treatises, are not 
in the least to be in the form of systematized 
statistical and doctrinal statement. They are 
merely to be talks, from one citizen of our big 
republic, on a subject ^hich he has at heart, to 
such of its citizens as may care to hear what he 
has to say thereon. 

First, then, as to organization. Union men, on 
meeting people of those branches of society not 
organizable as are wage earners, are frequently 
surprised at the latter 's want of knowledge of the 
methods, forms and mechanism of trade unions. 



AND LABOE ORGANIZATIONS 13 

With regard to labor organization they are in the 
mental state of the boy who is accustomed to 
seeing his mother frequently sewing on his but- 
tons, or the girl who lets her mother do the 
kitchen work, without further inquiry. Children 
sympathize with mother, certainly, but they are 
engrossed in their own important affairs and let 
her sweat. To-day, perhaps the majority of our 
people may understand how a trade union is put 
together, held intact by a system of dues and 
assessments, and engineered by officers who have 
been instructed by the members which way to 
head. But there is a minority, by no means small, 
who have not mastered that elementary chapter 
in trade unionism and who because of ignorance 
on this point cannot see the why or the where- 
fore of much that occurs in labor agitation and 
trade-union procedure. 

To summarize the major points needed in the 
instruction of anyone in this minority, I invite him 
to look with me at the established routine of the 
proceedings of one of these great congresses of 
labor. The American Federation of Labor is an 
organization of organizations. Federated, it is to 
be noted, not amalgamated. That is to say, each 
of its affiliated organizations is autonomous with 
respect to the affairs of its own jurisdiction. This 
lies either within a single occupation or within the 
several closely related occupations of an industry, 



14 THE WAGE EAENEES 

or, in case of the subsidiary central union, within 
a State or a city. 

Last year, in Eochester, K Y., the convention 
was made up of 355 delegates, of whom 231 were 
sent by 90 national unions (or international, which 
signifies that they include Canada), 30 State Fed- 
erations, 67 city central unions, 18 trade and fed- 
eral unions, and 7 fraternal organizations, includ- 
ing the British Trades Union Congress, the Cana- 
dian Trades and Labor Congress, the National 
Women's Trade Union League, the Women's 
International Union Label League, the Federal 
Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the 
American Federation of Catholic Societies, and 
the Church Association for the Advancement of 
Labor. 

The number of votes allotted these various 
classifications, however, tells a story not suggested 
by the mere enumeration of the delegates. The 
231 national (and international) representatives 
took 17,202 votes and all the others only 141. 
This signifies that while the Federation accords 
equality in debate to all organizations, it rarely 
gives the non-international bodies an effective 
voice on critical questions, when the votes are 
counted. This point is worth while explaining 
here, because a certain active political party has 
cried out to those nations of the earth in which 
the workers as a class are in political revolt that 



AND LABOE OEGANIZATIONS 15 

the American Federation of Labor is undemo- 
cratic, and therefore tyrannical and unjust, in its 
apportionment of the voting power at its conven- 
tions. By these representatives, the cities of New 
York and Chicago, both with hundreds of thou- 
sands of union members, have each only a single 
vote, while, for example, the Shingle Weavers' 
International Union, with perhaps a few thousand 
members, has 15 votes, and the Typographical 
Union, with fifty-four thousand seven hundred 
members, has 547 votes. Truly, on first glance a 
glaring anomaly — falling into the class of facts 
which are important if true. This is the explana- 
tion: All the members of the various unions of 
New York, Chicago, and the other cities sending 
delegates from their Central Labor Unions, as 
well as all the members of the State Federations, 
are already duly represented in the convention 
through the delegates of their respective national 
(or international) unions. Proof here, therefore, 
of how a half truth may be a whole error. 

As thus seen, the convention becomes really a 
delegate meeting of the national (or international) 
unions, which, however, through both generosity 
and policy, invite the State and city central organ- 
izations, which are made up of members of the 
all-encompassing international (let us call them) 
bodies, to participate in that forum, school of 
instruction in unionism, and common ground for 
promoting acquaintanceship which is termed a 



16 THE WAGE EAENEES 

convention. In the debates, and in tlie viva voce 
voting, the State and city delegates play an equal 
part with the others, but on a formal count they 
fall away quite to ciphers. The Federation thus 
permits the territorial organizations to contribute 
the force of their ideas, but lodges in the occupa- 
tional organizations the power of decisive yea and 
nay. 

A feature of the international unions is that 
each covers America. In the British Trades 
Union Congress there may be represented six 
national unions of laborers, or two or three of 
hatters, or tailors, every one having its own set 
of officials, but under the American Federation 
there can be no dual organization — in city, State, 
dr nation, or of any trade or calling whatsoever. 

Attempts have been made in America to pro- 
mote organization by entire industries — ^indus- 
trial organization'^ — in which distinctly separated 
crafts should be merged. The theory advanced 
here is that in case of a strike ^^an injury to one 
should be the concern of all,'' and the query is 
therefore put to unionists, "^^Why should only a 
single trade go on strike against a corporation, 
perhaps to sure defeat, whereas if all its employes 
were consolidated into one union they would be 
irresistible?" 

The practice which comes from experience, how- 
ever, has in the notable case of the Typographical 
Union shown the value of separating crafts in the 



AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 17 

printing industry, even after they liad once been 
amalgamated. In a few other unions in which the 
unity of all could be endangered by the independ- 
ent action of a small percentage, as, for illustra- 
tion, in the United Mine Workers of America, the 
cook is counted a member of the family, and all 
men employed in the mining industry are wisely 
organized as members of the same union. The 
American Federation has within a few years set 
up ^^ departments'^ — of the building trades, of the 
metal trades, of several railway men's organiza- 
tions — intended to give recognition to whatever is 
valuable in *^ industrial unionism.'' 

An international union is made up of *4ocaP' 
unions of its calling, each local union covering a 
town or city, or, in cases, a district. Some of the 
international unions have four, five, or even as 
many as twenty-five hundred local unions in as 
many places. Headquarters of the international 
bodies are located to suit the convenience of the 
trade. This brings many of them to the cities of 
the Middle West. The Federation headquarters 
are in Washington. 

The visitor who sits in the gallery of the 
convention hall, watching the proceedings, soon 
absorbs a volume of facts that corrects false im- 
pressions held by many persons among the gen- 
eral public who might through inquiry easily know 
better. Day by day the sessions are public ; repre- 
sentatives of the press are in constant attendance, 



18 THE WAGE EAENEES 

and the general public is cordially invited to 
witness the deliberations of the delegates, yet 
the idea that they are secret still lingers in the 
minds of some readers of daily papers who need 
only the word ^4abor'^ in a heading to make them 
skip on to the next column. As an evidence of the 
gullibility of men who should know better, it 
might be stated that some time ago a detective 
agency circularized employers proposing to sell to 
them information concerning the daily proceed- 
ings of the American Federation of Labor conven- 
tion, the impression being conveyed that these ses- 
sions were held in secret and the proceedings 
were difficult to obtain. 

The reference to dues and assessments by the 
speakers gives proof that the number of members 
in the unions is reckoned by book accounts repre- 
senting dollars and cents paid in, and not simply 
by the number of people who may say, ^^I am a 
trade unionist, '^ as one would say, ^^I am a Demo- 
crat. ' ^ It costs hard cash to be a union member, 
while to be an enthusiastic shouter for a political 
party nothing more is needed than patriotism. 

The one fact commented upon in the gallery is 
usually the absence of speechifying on the jfloor. 
Elocution, spell-binding, impassioned appeals to 
responsive emotionalism — there is little of all 
that. The big convention as a machine moves 
somewhat slowly. Every man can have a hear- 
ing if he gets down to business. In fact, the 



AND LABOR OEGANIZATIONS 19 

directness, simplicity, and relevancy of the points 
commonly made by men taking the floor is a dis- 
appointment both to observers who have looked 
for ''the talking for one's constituents" so much 
heard in legislative halls and to sentimentalists 
who yearn for burning words from inspired mis- 
sionaries proclaiming a paradise on earth soon 
to come through the magic of a universal panacea. 
The man in the gallery hears oflicers' annual 
reports read, motions made and referred to com- 
mittees, and then committee reports on these 
motions debated. Of course, there are now and 
then brought up on the platform, especially during 
the early days, prominent men and women who 
have something to say. If any of these froth, they 
discover their error. The delegates are cordial, 
but being mostly ^^old stagers" themselves, they 
know substance from slather. The fraternal dele- 
gates — trade unionists from Great Britain and 
Canada, clergymen representing various denom- 
inations, farmers from the national agricultural 
organizations, women from the international 
leagues — are heard with special attention. What 
each of them has to say marks off the advance 
made for trade unionism in some direction in 
American society or in some other part of the 
world. All attempts to commit the Federation to 
partisan politics the delegates watch narrowly. It 
dawns upon the spectator at length that among 
the delegates a suflScient number have had expe- 



20 THE WAGE EAENEES 

rience with all the social movements that have had 
their day, or are now affecting the public, to pre- 
vent trade unionism leaving its own track and 
switching off on other roads. The spectator also 
perceives that the trade union principles and 
policies of this country are pretty well settled. 
There is not very much probability of sudden 
change in them soon. The faith of the delegates 
is seen to be in the movement itself and as a 
whole. They are not awaiting the sky-rocket rise 
and marvelous achievements of a Napoleonic 
leader with a new sociological invention to work 
wonders for the wage earners. They are here in 
a practical turn of mind, patiently engaged in a 
piece of business. Have they sentiment? Aye, 
in its place. Hope? Certainly, to its definite 
limits. Idealism? Truly, as toned down to expe- 
rience. But emotional inspirations to action are 
rarely worked up on the convention floor. An 
assumption that governs the speakers is that their 
fellow-delegates have all passed through the pri- 
mary stages of ^^ conviction,'^ ^^ conversion, '^ 
^^ change of heart from sin,'' and ^^determination 
to live up to bounden duty. ' ' Therefore the argu- 
ments are mostly musterings of fact germane to 
the pending question. Now and again, naturally, 
a misplaced reformer declares his radicalism, or 
a fresh recruit displays his awkwardness in the 
drill, or a brashy youth talks as wildly as a one- 
term member of a legislature^ but toward the per- 



^ 



AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 21 

f ormances of these irregulars the attitude of the 
convention is that of the giant to the child. There 
may be a wave of amused laughter, and the inci- 
dent is over. 

The gallery spectator may have the usual run 
of initial inquiries regarding trade unionism 
answered in the development of the proceedings 
on the floor. Why, he will ask, organized labor? 

Why organized labor? After two days in the 
gallery, the spectator may well be inclined to ask. 
Why not organized labor? In the absence of the 
union, who could speak with any force to the indi- 
vidual employer or the employing class on behalf 
of the employed, as these delegates do by reason 
of their office? Who could render labor laws 
effective ? Who could ever present the complaints 
of the non-unionists, either to employers or 
society? Who could tell the world that there is 
a labor question ? In the statements of delegates, 
from any of the occupations represented in the 
convention, made not necessarily for justification 
of unionism, but rather in explaining every-day 
work, is convincing testimony that in the conduct 
of industry in general labor is treated as a com- 
modity in the market. The item of ^4abor" in 
the bookkeeping of an employer runs along in the 
column with the items of raw materials or other 
supplies. All things equal, the business man buys 
in the cheapest market. He exercises his choice in 
buying from one dealer or another in coal or ore. 



22 THE WAGE EARNERS 

lumber or leather. Similarly, he plays off labor 
against labor — the stock of unemployed labor 
against his own employed labor. Notwithstand- 
ing the waste of this process, as a general thing 
the dealers in materials survive through their 
foresight, management, judgment of the average 
market prices, and their being able to wait. But 
the wage worker, as a seller of labor, usually can- 
not wait. Standing alone, his labor is usually on 
a forced market, he competes for employment 
with his fellows, his wages tend to fall, and if the 
conditions under which he works are bad he can- 
not afford to remonstrate. In this situation, where 
can he find succor? In reply to this question the 
genius of this age has offered two solutions. The 
first is, to reform or revolutionize social condi- 
tions. Unhappily, the multiplicity of doctors and 
doctrines in the offer of this solution baffle the 
masses. ^^Put me in office, '^ the doctors say, ^^so 
that I may compel society to take my medicine. '' 
Verily, the result, thus far, has not remedied that 
defect in the labor market whereby the excess of 
the seekers for work over places for them puts in 
jeopardy the security of the wage earners at work. 
Clearly, then, the workers must try the other solu- 
tion, which modern times have developed — the 
mastering of the labor market by the wage 
workers managing the sale of their labor in com- 
bination. The New York Labor Bureau reports 
from year to year six per cent, or three, or per- 



AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 23 

haps eight, of the organized workers as unem- 
ployed. When insured by the solidarity of their 
labor organizations against low wages when their 
time shall come to get work, the idle union mem- 
bers refuse to sell their labor in the market at the 
buyers' first bid. Besides, in a progressive 
degree, the years see the trade union membership 
insured also against sickness, accident, death, and 
unemployment. Further, the union not only 
enforces the making of law prescribing conditions 
conservative of the health and comfort of the 
workers, but injects life into such laws. That all 
these statements are facts not to be contradicted, 
affecting intimately and vitally the daily existence 
of the toilers and that, awaiting the dawn of the 
millennium, they describe the practical solution of 
the immediate problems of the wage system, 
enters the mind of the spectator who sits, with the 
judgment of a juryman, in the convention gallery. 

Once convinced that some kind of a wage 
earners' union is today essential, the interested 
inquirer may have two subsequent questions 
answered the more easily. 

Why the present form of organization? Time 
has worked it out. It is not secret, with rites of 
initiation, regalia, grips, signs and sounding titles 
for officials, and foretokenage of social transfor- 
mation, for the reason that, by the present gener- 
ation of workers, mystery, symbolism, stage 
heroics, and lodge-room theatricals are not 



24 THE WAGE EAENERS 

regarded as appropriate to the directness of the 
character of trade unionism. Today's trade 
unionists are through with the lost motions which 
took up the time of their fathers in the noble and 
holy orders of knighthood that were wrecked on 
wind-mills. They want in their prosaic daily work 
of dealing with employers no aid from tinseled and 
gowned prestidigitateurs juggling tinted glass 
globes. They are accustomed to seeing a solid 
leather-covered ball flying straight from pitcher 
to batter and thence, whack, to the field, all in the 
open. From the little local union to the American 
Federation of Labor the pyramid of organization 
is simple, symmetrical, solid — parts of a well- 
planned machine, constructed for smooth-running, 
co-operative work. 

Why not in politics? Well, which party? A 
new party? Or one of the old parties? Political 
action requires unity upon demands sufficiently 
important to induce men to break their usual 
party connections. Up to the present, trade 
unionists have not reached agreement on prob- 
lematical social remedies only" remotely possible 
of application. As for projects falling within the 
limits of practicability, they exert a force favor- 
able to the working-classes. That the labor laws 
now on the statute books are there through union 
effort is shown by the fact that in States where 
labor organization is weak the laws are few or 
quite a dead letter, labor bureaus are non-existent 



AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 25 

or feeble, and legislators are not well convinced 
by labor committees that labor has a big vote and 
wants at least a small voice in legislation. How- 
ever sad it may be to contemplate the masses not 
ruling, as they should in their majority, the nn- 
budgeable fact stands that they, like the pro- 
fessors of economics, the statesmen who impose 
tariffs, the idealists who construct Utopias, do not 
agree on how and what to rule. 

Why strike ? Otherwise, the reply must be, the 
question of mastery of the market cannot be com- 
pletely settled. Why boycott? When the workers 
shall be the only offending party in this regard, 
they alone may be called upon to defend the pro- 
cedure. But practice of the boycott is common to 
all groups of society. Why violence in the case 
of strikes ? We tell you that unionists are rarely 
as violent as are non-unionists, that oganization 
generally develops discipline, that an unorganized 
community is less lawful during labor disputes 
than one in which the unions are strong. Why 
refuse to work with the non-unionist? Because 
he offers a standing low bid for a job to the buyer 
of labor — if for no other reason. 

So run the usual questions, and so the replies. 
The one and the other have formed the basis of 
volumes. Only an index to them can be outlined 
here. 

The reader has in these lines been invited as a 
spectator to the convention gallery. He has had 



26 THE WAGE EAENEES 

described to him the body of labor delegates as 
one sitting with them has for years seen them. 
He has observed them at their task of legislating 
for the membership of the Federation in matters 
lying beyond the jurisdiction of the various 
separate unions. He has learned that the labor 
organization is a great modern institution, as last- 
ing as the social conditions by which it has been 
produced. Its attitude toward other institutions 
of the time, its policies and practices, its future — 
these are topics with which I shall attempt to deal 
in subsequent chapters. 



CHAPTEE 11. 

THE WAGE EAKNEES AND IMMIGRATIOK. 

The spectator in the gallery who follows the 
proceedings of a convention of the American Fed- 
eration of Labor, or any of the great national or 
international trade unions, thus obtaining from 
the discussions direct information on live labor 
problems, has opportunity for hearing first-hand 
testimony as to some of the far-reaching economic 
effects of immigration. 

This subject, he may observe, on mentally look- 
ing back over the debates when the convention is 
ended, has been treated by the delegates as first 
of all a wage earners' question. At the present 
time the incoming millions from Europe do not by 
any means enter at once into the various levels of 
the American industries and professions. Their 
America is our labor market, in fact almost invar- 
iably our unskilled labor market. They do not 
start in buying a business, taking up a farm, or 
selecting a location where they may practice as 
lawyer, doctor, minister, or writer. From the 
newly arrived immigrants, therefore, the man- 
agers of affairs, the leaders in commercial life, 
the politicians and lawmakers, the editorial fra- 
ternity, the landowners, all are in no immediate 
danger of competition. Hence these classes but 



28 THE WAGE EAENERS 

remotely feel any of the effects of immigration 
other than such as are apparently beneficial to 
themselves through the cheapness of labor and the 
submissiveness of the laborers. It is otherwise 
with the wage worker. The sole avenue of 
entrance to America for perhaps ninety-nine per 
cent, of the immigrants being through the un- 
skilled labor market, this, to wage earners, is the 
fact of all facts relative to immigration. This 
truth sets aside as irrelevant and misleading the 
mere statistician's consideration that in propor- 
tion to population a million and a quarter of immi- 
grants in 1910 is less than the 427,000 of 1854. 
Sixty years ago, fifty, forty — ^yes, thirty — years 
ago the main volume of immigration poured west- 
ward. In that direction lay the open land — oppor- 
tunity. Moreover, only once in the succeeding 
twenty years was the tide of 1854 equaled. At 
one time it fell to one-sixth of that year, and 
usually it was less than one-half. But for nearly 
a decade now the gross arrivals yearly have aver- 
aged a million. 

The wage workers of America know full well 
that ^^opportunity'' in the old sense of the public 
lands no longer exists in this country. They know 
that the immigrants now coming are not on arrival 
so fully qualified to be Americans, to be independ- 
ent wage earners to be soon candidates for every 
walk of our national life, as were the immigrants 
generally even so late as twenty years ago. They 



AND IMMIGEATION 29 

are less qualified through their illiteracy, their 
speaking languages not akin to English, their 
undevelopment in the skilled trades, their tradi- 
tions of dependence upon masters and paternal 
institutions, through even their methods of work. 
They must begin building themselves up as citi- 
zens with little more foundation than their bodily 
strength. If the true definition of ^ ^ an American' ^ 
is ^'one who is the product of American institu- 
tions, '^ our old-time immigrants were generally 
familiar in their home countries with a goodly 
part of those institutions, especially their spirit, 
while the present-day immigrants have usually 
toward them merely the position of untaught chil- 
dren handicapped by the temporary deafness and 
dumbness of not understanding the English 
language. 

The spectator may learn from his seat in the 
gallery the attitude of the delegates on the immi- 
gration question. It is a logical attitude with 
reference to events. It is shown, not so much in 
the discussions of immigration in itself, as in 
statements made regarding the pressure of the 
freshly arrived immigrants into the fields of com- 
petition in the various occupations. A point to 
be noticed is the absence of prejudice against the 
immigrants ; the adverse judgment pronounced is 
upon the men who bring them here. The note that 
is sounded most frequently in the words of the 



30 THE WAGE EAENEES 

speakers is sympathy with the immigrants in their 
poverty and helplessness. 

A majority of the delegates, if not themselves 
foreign born, are the sons or grandsons of men 
who crossed the sea to get to this country. Most 
numerous and active are those having Irish 
names. Next come Germans. Then men of other 
northern European nationalities. Delegates of 
the Latin races are making their appearance in 
recent years. The English names common to that 
part of the American population which predomi- 
nated in this country to so great an extent prior 
to 1850 are rare. These facts in themselves reveal 
certain social developments. The old families of 
New England, the Middle and the Middle Western 
States now put comparatively few of their sons 
at a trade. Those old families were on the spot 
when the cream of the country was to be taken 
for the gathering. Eough work hence gradually 
went out of fashion with them. To-day the well- 
off among them give their poor relations the gen- 
teel indoor jobs, which enable the holders at least 
to get along, many of them holding aloof from 
the wage-working classes. The Irish-American 
wage earners have two prominent characteristics ; 
among the most skilful of mechanics, they are ever 
sent to the front as standard bearers for their 
fellow- workmen. In certain of the out-door trades, 
such as railroading and the erection of build- 
ings, men of Irish- American blood are in a large 



AND IMMIGEATION 31 

majority, a fact significant of racial hardihood. 
Germans or German- Americans come out strong 
as brewers, bakers, cigarmakers, garment cutters, 
butchers, tailors — callings in general requiring 
patience, study and persistence, or to be traced to 
a training in their home land. 

The complaints of the inroads of the ever- 
arriving immigrants on their labor markets come 
from the men of lesser skill among the miners, 
metal workers, street laborers, or in the building 
trades, although some of the indoor workers such 
as those employed in the textile industry and the 
garment trades, in both of which a very large per- 
centage of the wage earners are foreign born, 
suffer in their unionism — which means their scale 
of wages and other union conditions — through the 
competition of the multitudinous hungry and 
humble strangers who, once here, must get their 
living here. 

These points are plainly made in the testimony 
of delegates representing occupations in which the 
new immigrants have displaced, or are displacing, 
those who have been here long enough to sniff 
liberty and aspire to American standards, who 
themselves only a few years ago displaced Ameri- 
cans or Europeans of other races than their own. 
As such delegates, standing on the floor of the 
convention, describe conditions among the unor- 
ganized immigrants who are crowding out the 
organized in their occupations, or privately 



32 THE WAGE EAENERS 

between sessions give information on the subject 
from experience covering many parts of the 
country, the inquiring visitor is impressed that 
here he is face to face with the immigration prob- 
lem in its vitally important social phase — that of 
its direct results upon America as the land of the 
independent wage-working citizen, to whom all the 
possibilities of a high civilization should remain 
open. 

The delegates of the occupations most closely 
interested can with truth tell the inquirer that, 
simply through the inability of the helpless, 
ignorant, newly-arrived immigrants, our laws pro- 
tective of life and health are frequently a dead 
letter, in mine or manufactory, among the trans- 
port workers or the building trades men. Upon 
the labor unions falls mainly the burden of 
enforcing protective enactments, a fact true in Eu- 
rope as well as in this country. Where the unions 
are weak, the mere maintenance of their scale of 
wages requiring most of their energies, these laws 
are often neglected, and wh^ere no unions exist 
they pass to nothingness. It is a certainty that 
where factory girls are burned to death by the 
score or the lives of miners are lost by the hun- 
dreds, the question may be asked: Why were 
they not duly protected by the existing laws ? And 
the answer is quite sure to be : Because the union 
was not strong enough to cope with a law-break- 
ing employer. Where there are no unions, vig- 



AND IMMIGRATION 33 

ilant and systematic defense of the workers is 
well-nigh at an end. 

Poverty is the weakness, the undoing of the 
poor, ever the one ample explanation for their 
defenselessness. How numerous are the poor, 
how their deprivations at times imman them, 
how unrequited their labors, how heroic their 
struggles can be told by the labor repre- 
sentatives, speaking for their own callings 
at a convention. Begin with the bakers. Why are 
bakers in New York forever striking? A decade 
ago, twenty years ago, a quarter of a century ago 
New York striking bakers put up their plea to the 
State lawgivers, invoked public opinion in their 
favor, called upon organized labor for help, some 
union members even committed acts of violence 
that they might be jailed as martyrs in the hope of 
making known the necessity of improving condi- 
tions in the baking industry. Yet today in the 
New York cellar bakeries still toils poverty in 
mortal pain. It took thirty years of agitation to 
obtain a few effective statutes governing bakery 
sanitation, passed only a few years ago. How 
long are these laws to be enforced? The employ- 
ing bakers carried the bake-shop ten-hour law up 
to the United States Supreme Court to have it 
declared unconstitutional, and succeeded. "Within 
the past two years New York journeymen bakers 
in large numbers were striking against working 
unlimited hours and against compulsory boarding 



34 THE WAGE EAENERS 

in the shop — in the dark over-heated and inade- 
quately ventilated nndergronnd bake-room in 
which they worked. Withal, their wages were 
among the lowest. The bakers ' unions are difficult 
to maintain ; the better conditions gained through 
successful strikes alternate with the worse condi- 
tions thereafter gradually enforced by employers. 
Why this state of things in the baking trade? 
Poverty, of course. The poverty of the penniless, 
hungry immigrant of today competing with the 
but slightly less pitiable poverty of the toilsome 
immigrant of yesterday, engaged in the task of 
Sisyphus — his merely elementary needs forming 
both the hill to be overcome and the stone that he 
fails to get to the top. 

The reservoir of labor on which the bakery 
employers make constant drafts is the mass of 
unemployed in New York, continually fed by the 
stream of immigrants arriving from Europe. As 
with the baking, so with the clothing industry. 
For years in every strike lost by the garment 
workers or lockout won by their employers, the 
determining factor has bee^ the shiploads of 
people arriving at the landing place at the Battery, 
with less per head in their pockets than two weeks ^ 
purchase on life. About seven years ago, conse- 
quently, the executive board of the garment 
workers' union, themselves nearly all foreign 
born, passed resolutions calling for restricted 
immigration. 



AND IMMIGRATION 35 

If an examination be made of one occupation 
after another in New York, it will be found that 
in all those which, like baking and garment mak- 
ing, may be followed in this country by persons 
not speaking English, the immediate cause of dire 
poverty is unemployment. This simply means 
that the arriving immigrants are not needed in 
the labor market, except to be used by employers 
in enforced competition with the wage-earners 
already here. 

But, it will be asked, is really the encom- 
passing direct cause of dependent poverty today 
in America unemployment? Eecent reports are: 
The cases of 5,000 families applying to the Charity 
Organization Society for aid being duly recorded 
with reference to the sources of deprivation, ten 
specific causes were set down as those to which 
disability to make a living were attributable. In 
more than 69 per cent, a factor was unemploy- 
ment, though, naturally, associated with other 
factors — chronic physical ailments, widowhood, 
etc. Intemperance was a concomitant in less than 
17 per cent, of all these cases. In 4,325 families 
applying to the United Hebrew Charities for aid, 
there were 1,348 cases of unemployment on the 
part of the bread-winners. Of 62,851 unoccupied 
members of labor unions in the State of New 
York at the end of March, 1910, 42,010 were out 
because of lack of employment. The State Com- 
mission on unemployment reports that the records 



36 THE WAGE EARNEES 

of charitable organizations show that a large pro- 
portion of cases of destitution is due primarily to 
lack of work. The Bowery Mission in two and 
one-half years found work for only 9,000 out of 
about 40,000 applicants; the National Employ- 
ment Exchange in 1910 for only 4,600 out of 24,600 
applicants; the Division of Information, United 
States Bureau of Immigration, only 3,812 out of 
24,000. 

There may have been a time when New York 
statistics for unemployment were not accurately 
suggestive as a gauge for the country as a whole. 
But the investigator, as a preliminary step, might 
profitably inquire in November at a convention of 
the American Federation of Labor as to whether 
the delegates can give evidence that New York 
conditions in this respect are typical or not for the 
industrial centers in general of the United States 
today. What would necessarily be the reply of 
the miners, the steel workers, the building trades 
laborers, the freight handlers, the railroad main- 
tenance of way employes, the seamen, the labor- 
ers for roadway and similar contractors? What 
the reply of the indoor occupations — the meedle 
workers, the mill operatives, the light metal shop 
hands, the factory workers in a score of national 
industries 1 The answer is to be found in the long 
contested strikes of the last few years. The mere 
mention of geographical names calls up heart- 
rending accounts of the sufferings of wage earners 



AND IMMIGEATION 37 

who have had their bitter choice between uncom- 
plaining insuflBciency while at work and desperate 
straits while on strike — Westmoreland county and 
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Grand Eapids, Michi- 
gan; the mining fields of West Virginia. Every 
year New York and Chicago and other large cities 
show the possibilities of labor disputes involving 
men and women by the tens of thousands. With 
the successive investigations of labor conditions, 
by the unions, by labor bureaus, by social workers, 
the industrial and mining centers of the country 
are seen to present the same general features of 
masses of immigrant workmen, employed and 
unemployed, at times weakening trade unions 
through competition, at times, whether organized 
or unorganized, breaking out in strikes, and 
astonishing the public with their recklessness, or 
their stubborn resistance, or their patient, dogged 
suffering. 

The rapidity with which the new immigrant is 
penetrating classes of workmen other than those 
ranking lowest in skill, into which he usually 
enters on arriving in America, is becoming 
noticeable. The youth five years in this country, 
learning with his English some of the ways of 
young America, makes for a better paying grade 
of work than his father's. The little boy or girl 
of ten years of age on arrival is in four years 
legally a factory hand. The control of the market 
for rough labor by the new immigration is thus 



38 THE WAGE EAENEES 

followed by a pressure upon higher forms of work 
that Americans or the older immigrants and their 
sons have assumed must remain their own. Ele- 
vator and hotel boys, street car conductors, musi- 
cians, skilled building trades workmen, salesmen, 
semi-skilled benchmen in workshops — the physiog- 
nomies of these classes of work-people no longer in- 
variably suggest American or northern European 
birthplaces. The possibilities of the competition 
embodied in the unparalleled migration of the 
European masses to America is beginning to be 
keenly felt in the ranks of the lesser commercial 
men and even in the professions in parts of the 
country which a few years ago had not been made 
aware of an immigration question. The self-con- 
tained established small gentry who composedly 
moved along in fancied security in their several 
genteel occupations are awakening to economic 
troubles of their own. They are finding out what 
competition for opportunity to gain a livelihood 
for small capitalists and propertyless men of lib- 
eral education means and are learning that all 
social problems are not to be'^settled by shrewd- 
ness or shirking in dealing with questions of mar- 
riage and the family. 

While the movement of the new immigrant and 
his quickly assimilated children upward in the 
hierarchy of occupations is thus proceeding apace, 
his spread in masses over the area of the country 
in the last few years has been marvelous. A recent 



AND IMMIGRATION 39 

study in labor circles of this phase of the immigra- 
tion problem has brought before the public the 
picture of a network of variously named agencies 
having in view finding work for immigrants and 
assisting them to any point in the United States 
where it is to be had. No similar aid exists for 
American workmen. The headquarters of these 
agencies invariably connect with points close to 
the landing place of the immigrants in New York. 
Blind indeed must be the investigator on this sub- 
ject who cannot or will not see the power of the 
steamship lines behind the work being carried on 
so extensively by some of these agencies to take 
care of the arriving immigrants. 

All these facts bearing on the subject of immi- 
gration have come home to many of the delegates 
to the convention of the American Federation of 
Labor. Probably not one of them, and indeed 
not one prominent labor man in the entire country, 
but has passed through the same series of impres- 
sions and sentiments regarding immigration. 
jWhere once was acquiescence, if not approval, 
there is now opposition. Labor's sympathy with 
labor reaches from America to Europe. Pity, a 
desire to help, hope for a better future for all 
labor, a faith in human nature in its lowliest estate 
— these are sentiments usually aroused in the 
breast of the American workingman in contem- 
plating the hard fate of his brother in Europe. 
Aye, and on that string has the cunning hand of 



40 THE WAGE EAENEES 

master manipulators of labor long played. Great 
wealth has been absorbed by the steamship lines 
carrying the millions of immigrants to America; 
great wealth is being produced by the help of 
the immigrants for the men getting far more than 
their share of production. It is the first business 
of steamship companies, big manufacturers, and 
great corporations to procure dividends. Their 
concern for the workmen, for a just society, for 
permanency of the democratic institutions of 
America is secondary. But since, as we have seen, 
immigration is to the American workingmen 
first of all a wages question, the organized wago 
earners have been obliged to study it closely, have 
hence moved beyond the merely sentimental stage 
in contemplating it, have many a time soberly dis- 
cussed it in their unions and at their conventions, 
and finally have decided how duty to themselves 
and their country requires them to act. 

The annual convention of the American Feder- 
ation of Labor held at Toronto, Canada, Novem- 
ber, 1909, voted for restriction; it resolved to 
demand an illiteracy test, a money in pocket test, 
an increased head tax, and the abolition of the 
Government Distribution Bureau. Since that time 
the policy of organized labor then adopted has 
been strengthened by the findings of the United 
States Immigration Commission. The most strik- 
ing passage in the commission's report was: 



AND IMMIGRATION 41 

^^The investigations of the commission show an 
oversupply of unskilled labor in basic industries 
to an extent which indicates an oversupply of 
unskilled labor in the industries of the country as 
a whole, and therefore demands legislation which 
will at the present time restrict the further admis- 
sion of such unskilled labor." 

The commission held it to be desirable that **a 
sufficient number be debarred to produce a marked 
effect upon the present supply of unskilled labor. ' ' 
It recognized as possible the first three of the four 
methods of exclusion recommended by organized 
labor, with others, the most significant of which 
was *^the limitation of the number of each race 
arriving each year to a certain percentage of the 
average of that race arriving during a given 
period of years.'' 

Of what avail are ^^commissions on congestion" 
in our cities, ^^ State labor exchanges," *^ commit- 
tees of investigation into the condition of the 
poor," ^^ surveys of industrial centers," and sim- 
ilar social reform agencies or movements, if they 
do not result in emphasizing properly the real 
menace to the American working classes and to all 
American society? That menace, clearly, lies in 
the many millions of the victims of poverty and 
ignorance, of wretched government and backward 
civilization, in southern and eastern Europe. To 
European steamship companies and great Ameri- 
can capitalists their exploitation has been as 
mines of gold and quarries of diamonds. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE WAGE EABNERS AND COMPENSATIOK FOB INDUS- 
TRIAL ACCIDENTS. 

The foremost national economic issue that bears 
directly on the labor market, as we have seen in 
the preceding chapter, is immigration. However, 
the most urgent practical measure to provide by 
legislation for the protection of wage earners 
against the want and suffering resulting from mis- 
fortunes to which they are peculiarly liable, is 
^^ compensation.^' 

In this one word compensation are comprised 
the possible methods not only of compensating 
wage workers or their families in case of indus- 
trial accidents but of preventing such accidents. 
"Where compensation has been established, pre- 
vention has followed. Also, wherever enforced, 
the two measures together have brought about a 
marked decrease in the fatalities and other cas- 
ualties proportionate to the number of persons at 
work. 

Statistical statements as to the industrial acci- 
dents occurring in America seem incredible to the 
casual reader who glances at the subject superfi- 
cially. Significance of the extent or the social 
import of the facts behind their tabular present- 
ment usually fails to settle itself clearly in such a 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 43 

person's mind. He has never stopped mentally to 
digest the proportions or the relations of the facts, 
or the suggested conditions or implied conse- 
quences embodied in the figures. Just as, to his 
mind, falling from a precipice of the height of 300 
feet is sure death, and from the top of the wall of 
the Yosemite, with its 3,000 feet, is no more, the 
horror of 300 or 3,000 deaths is to his feelings 
much the same. A single fatal accident occurring 
under his eye is more shocking to him than read- 
ing a sketchy account in a newspaper of a thou- 
sand violent deaths in the antipodes. Large fig- 
ures standing for indefinite ideas fail to stir his 
emotions deeply. Hence, when told that in Ameri- 
can industries a certain number of thousands are 
killed in the course of a year, a reader of this 
description may dimly doubt that it is wholly true, 
or read with the impression that a year is a long 
span of measurement, or, in his skimming of 
points not touching himself and his concentration 
on points regarding his own interests, he may be 
in no mental state of receptivity as to the entire 
subject. Industrial risks may be far from his per- 
sonal experiences. The enormous indictment of 
society contained in the abstract statistics passing 
before his perhaps inattentive eyes escapes his 
discernment. 

But let us look for a moment at this deplorable 
matter of death and maiming in our industries in 
a light apart from its every-day presentation in 



44 THE WAGE EAENEES 

unmethodical print, as most of ns see it. Let ns 
suppose that in the course of the last twelve 
months, by a marvelous mastery of certain forces 
of nature through new mechanical devices, indus- 
trial production has received a ten-fold stimulus. 
Imagine, then, how the world would stand aghast 
if tomorrow morning the daily papers were to be 
taken up, as they would be to the extent of pages 
and pages, with an account of a frightful accident 
in New York City by which more than two thou- 
sand workingmen had lost their lives and more 
than twenty thousand had been badly injured — 
the occurrence due to forces operating the 
newly invented machinery to the full extent of 
its enormous power, and to the absence of protec- 
tion to the workers against its complicated parts. 
The calamity would, indeed, ' ' stagger humanity. ' ' 
For a month, at least, harrowing particulars — as 
to the causes of the accident, its social effects, the 
experiences of the wounded, the sad plight of the 
families of the killed — would in word and picture 
continue to pack the columns of the press. But, 
imagine now the intense horro^r, the woe, the con- 
sternation throughout the country, and indeed all 
countries, if at the end of a month Chicago were 
to become the scene of a similar disaster, in which 
the loss in killed and wounded should equal that 
accompanying the accident in New York. Then, 
if in another month San Francisco were to tele- 
graph the news of a like catastrophe in that city— 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 45 

what would all civilized mankind begin saying? 
Would intelligent men any longer tolerate calling 
such an occurrence an '^accident"? And if the 
horrid thing went on, now in one city and now in 
another, monthly for a year, would not the uni- 
versal cry go up, ^^Stop this slaughter by any 
means possible, however costly to society!" 
Everywhere, in every church, club, business asso- 
ciation, chamber of commerce, in every assem- 
blage of men and women, for any social purpose, 
this recurrent destruction of men by the thou- 
sands, each event resembling in its bloodiness the 
most sickening battle-fields of history, would be 
denounced as a national infamy. Should any 
hypocrite refer to these frightful occurrences 
as ^^acts of God," he would be denounced as 
blasphemous. Should an apologist refer to them 
as ^^the natural price of our industrial pre- 
eminence," he would be told indignantly that life 
must be held sacred though industry should 
perish. Should it be clearly shown that the origin 
of much of the slaughter lay in causes for the most 
part easily removable — that, in fact, they had been 
actually done away with largely by other nations 
— sentiments of patriotism would promptly rein- 
force the instincts of humanity in our people. 
Every legislative body, every court, every public 
man speedily would be constrained to lend a hand 
in the reforms necessary to cut down to a mini- 
mum the risks in this respect to human life. No 



46 THE WAGE EAENEES 

doubt, too, the call would be general to alleviate, 
through appropriate methods of insurance, the 
suffering consequent upon whatever casualties, in 
spite of the best of human care, should thenceforth 
occur in our industries. 

Now, what part does imagination play in this 
nightmare of a picture? It has merely focussed 
the actually distributed elements of time and 
place. Instead of the wonderful devices of the 
new mechanics having been suddenly applied 
within a year, they have been the gradual growth 
of a century. Instead of one concentrated mass 
accident a month in a particular city, thousands 
of separate accidents occur in the course of every 
month all over the United States. 

"What is more, the real number of killings and 
serious injuries outnumber by far the two thou- 
sand and the twenty thousand that we have set 
down for our imaginary monthly total. No one 
can present absolutely accurate statistics on this 
subject. Our government makes no census of the 
victims of accidents in industries. Statisticians 
disagree in estimating their number. There is no 
common agreement as to what degree of hurt to a 
workman should be termed ^^an injury.'' There 
is a border line of time between an outright 
fatality and a death after a period in which other 
causes than the accident may have supervened. 
But if we take the most moderate figures on the 
question we have those of Dr. Frederick L. Hoff- 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 47 

man, of the Prudential Company, the specialty of 
which is working-class insurance, whose estimate 
is 30,000 to 35,000 fatal industrial accidents in the 
United States annually, while several other statis- 
ticians have estimated that the lowest number of 
persons injured at their work sufficiently to 
occasion an average loss of two weeks is at least 
250,000 to 300,000. Thus the actual facts of indus- 
trial slaughter outrun by twenty per cent, or more 
what we have imagined. Yet there are estimates 
in print, from men qualified to form them, which 
are nearly double those here quoted. 

Some comparisons may be drawn to show how 
the United States has stood still, or worse, in deal- 
ing with this national problem. For the twenty- 
one years 1888-1908, the proportion of railway 
employes killed outright in this country remained 
nearly constant at about a quarter of one per cent, 
each year. The proportion of injuries, however, 
increased. With the expansion of the industry the 
number should have about doubled, as a fact it 
quadrupled. For British railway employes, 
fatalities per 1,000 annually average seven-tenths 
of one per cent., for American, 2.41 per cent. For 
miners we have Europe, 1.45 ; United States, 3.60 
— in other words, for each 10,000 miners em- 
ployed, Europe has 14 to 15 killed every year ; the 
United States 36. In all the industries together, 
the proportion killed here is three times the num- 
ber for any other country. 



48 THE WAGE EAENEES 

Compensation undeniably is followed by pre- 
vention. It is unnecessary to restate here in any 
detail the experiences on this point of Germany 
and Great Britain. They may be summed up in 
the words of Dr. Hoffman, who, pleading that "si 
most earnest effort should be made to profit by 
the industrial methods of European countries// 
says that ^4t should not be impossible to save at 
least one-third, and perhaps one half [of our total 
mortality] , by intelligent and rational methods of 
factory inspection, legislation, and control. '' He 
further states that the non-fatal accidents, which 
he computes as numbering in all two millions 
annually, ^^not only involve a vast amount of 
human suffering and sorrow, but materially cur- 
tail the normal longevity among those exposed to 
the often needless risk of industrial casualties." 

Not only have the two other great industrial 
countries of the world, England and Germany, 
shown us the way to prevent fully 50 per cent, of 
the average of our industrial killings and maim- 
ings, but they have carried compensation to a 
science sufficiently advanced to permit us to profit 
by their example. With us, in this matter, the main 
practical problems at present relate, first, to 
adapting the best foreign methods and practice 
to our dual system of government, and, second, to 
bringing compensation within constitutional limi- 
tations. 

It has been far from enough in the United 



AND COMPENSATION FOR ACCIDENTS 49 

States in this work of substituting compensation 
for traditional employers' liability, to shock and 
reshock the country with the startling facts of 
our delinquency. The task of exposition and pro- 
test, while it has been fulfilled sufficiently to stir 
to action groups of men of advanced opinions and 
patriotic and benevolent sentiments, seems to 
have failed to work the truth, at once disgraceful 
and terrible, into the very hearts and minds of 
the general masses, as must be done before our 
people fully realize the duty thereby imposed 
upon them. This stage of arousing public senti- 
ment it seems to be necessary to go over again 
and again — ^by repetition of oft-printed statistics, 
by quotation of authorities on the subject, by 
turning the picture to every angle of fact and 
every angle of the imagination. To accumulate 
a proper momentum in favor of compensation, 
however, at the present stage in the progress of 
the movement, seems to be the least baffling part 
of the work. Support of the people is to be a 
certainty, some time, we may be assured, but 
what as to the law necessary to establish a system 
of uniform and general indemnity? 

In Germany and England, procedure after con- 
viction as to the social necessity of relieving the 
working-classes of the burden incident to indus- 
trial accidents was by an open road. Germany 
chose one method, England another. In Germany, 
State, employer, and employed contribute by pre- 



50 THE WAGE EAENERS 

scribed methods to the compensation funds of 
the industries. In England, employes make no 
direct payment, the employers generally acquit- 
ting themselves of their part of the duty by 
bringing into service the insurance companies. 
But in our country, except in a few States, it 
has not been made certain that the fundamental 
law is adaptable to either of these two methods 
or to any other yet proposed, if the relief of in- 
dustry in general be contemplated. The actual 
problem of compensation in this country is how 
to obviate a decision by the Court of Appeals of 
New York, possibly to be followed in other States, 
rendered March 24, 1911, by which a tentative 
law affecting dangerous trades, passed the previ- 
ous year, was declared to be unconstitutional. 
The court regarded the law as violating private 
right ^^by taking the property of one and giving 
it to another without due process of law.'' Here 
is not the place to try to argue down the long 
series of legal points made against the statute by 
the court in its opinion of ten thousand words. 
Nor can we dwell on the outcry of surprise and 
indignation which, when the court gave out its 
decision, went up throughout the land from all 
the social agencies promotive of the welfare of 
the masses. The court seemed to repudiate what 
in the light of accepted advanced teachings are 
imperative duties of the State toward the work- 
ing-classes. Nor is it worth while here to do 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 51 

more than merely call attention to the fact that 
the New York law was the result of patient study, 
research, and labor on the part of representative 
committees of citizens, many of them accustomed 
to deal with matters of law and legislation. The 
court settled the question for New York in its 
way by its lights. To what extent its decision 
stands as precedent for courts in other States 
remains to be seen. 

A proposition so to amend the New York con- 
stitution that it may authorize a compulsory com- 
pensation law has since been under consideration 
by the Legislature. Undoubtedly it is a fact that 
working-class opinion in the United States is at 
present strongly in favor of automatic compen- 
sation and opposed to its alternative. State in- 
surance, as usually presented up to this time. 
The workers feel, first, that any compulsory pay- 
ment by them for insurance would be a deduction 
from wages, and second, that their customary 
share in the risks and losses in any and all occu- 
pations have never obtained from society due 
consideration. In countless ways the health of 
the wage workers while they are at work is under- 
mined and their lives shortened, and there is no 
indemnity. For all minor accidents, by which 
only a few days' work and pay are lost, no com- 
pensation can be forthcoming. No life-insurance 
can adequately reimburse the widow and orphan 
for the loss of the bread-winner. While on the 



52 THE WAGE EAENEES 

side of the employers there may come a financial 
loss of a small percentage through compensation, 
sure to be minimized and generalized by them 
through a system of insurance, on the side of the 
workingman the injuries which do not disable 
him permanently, even when compensated up to 
any possible legal limit, may leave the individual 
a loser to the extent of an undermined consti- 
tution or displacement in his grade as a work- 
man. Such considerations, which could be en- 
larged upon, lead the wage earners to assert that 
compensation is not justly a burden of labor. 

That certain fictions of the present-day legal 
theories lingering in the statutes and judicial in- 
terpretations of the common law, regarding in- 
demnity to workmen for injuries, are in time to 
be wholly displaced by living truths there can be 
little doubt. Those fictions had their origin in 
the facts of the old days of produ:ction on a small 
scale, with the employer a shopmate ; we now live 
in the era of production on the trust scale, with 
the employer an impersonality. Times have 
changed ; circumstances of employment have com- 
pletely changed; the dicta of the law must con- 
sequently change with the facts. Exempting an 
employer from responsibility because an injury 
to an employe has been caused by the act of one 
out of perhaps twenty thousand fellow-workmen 
is clearly injustice. To blame an employe for 
alleged neglect of precautions against dangers of 



\ 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 53 

which he could not be aware as existing in the 
maze of machinery in a huge workshop is sheer 
nonsense and cruelty. To say that the employe 
assumed the risks in an occupation which is to- 
day entirely made up of risks is mere empty talk. 
These decayed relics of the so-called wisdom of 
the law are of a certainty to be thrown aside. 
To the social conscience of today, as foundations 
for unjust dealings with employes, they are in- 
tolerable. 

That workmen can on the average collect 
damages in only eleven cases in a hundred 
brought in the courts indicates the legal chicanery 
of counsel hairsplitting over antiquated notions, 
and not the prevalent American sense of fair 
dealing. What an exhibition of squandering 
energy and money is made in the hundred million 
dollars paid by employers in the eleven years 
1894-1905 as premiums to liability insurance com- 
panies, of which only 43 per cent, was awarded 
to injured workmen, to be further diminished by 
a large percentage through costs and attorneys' 
fees. The trial of liability cases in the courts is 
a national burden. Governor Hadley of Missouri 
has asserted that the taxes going to the support 
of the judges engaged upon them form a sum 
greater than the total recovered by the injured 
workmen. The president of the Travelers' In- 
surance Company says that more than one-half 
the time of the courts is taken up in settling eon- 



54 THE WAGE EAENEES 

troversies between employers and employed. 
Systematic compensation would wipe out this 
social waste. 

The New York Commission which reported 
favorably the bill which as a law was subsequently 
killed by the Court of Appeals, thus summarized 
the reasons for proposing to rescind the present 
laws relating to liability for accidents and sub- 
stitute compensation: 

^'1 — The present system in New York rests on 
a basis that is economically unwise and unfair ; in 
operation it is wasteful, uncertain, and productive 
of antagonisms between workmen and employers. 

"2 — It is satisfactory to none and tolerable 
only to those employers and workmen who practi- 
cally disregard their legal rights and obligations 
and fairly share the burden of accidents in in- 
dustries. 

^^3 — The evils of the system are most marked 
in hazardous employments, where the trade risk is 
high and serious accidents frequent. 

''4t — As a matter of fact, workmen in the 
dangerous trades do not, and practically cannot, 
provide for themselves adequate accident insur- 
ance, and therefore the burden of serious acci- 
dents falls on the workmen least able to bear it, 
and brings many of them and their families to 
want.'^ 

Within the last four years, after official investi- 
gation of the subject, either through special com- 
missions or committees of the legislatures, a 
number of our States, including most of those 



AND COMPENSATION FOR ACCIDENTS 55 

in the lead in industry, have, by what amount to 
tentative laws, considered and set np one form or 
another of either direct compensation or State 
insurance, usually, however, of very restricted 
application. Compensation laws, in most in- 
stances elective, have been passed in California, 
Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York 
(decided to be unconstitutional), Wisconsin, Illi- 
nois, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Massachusetts, 
Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Ehode Island, and 
Washington. In California and jWisconsin the 
compensation laws are compulsory as to work- 
men for the State and the municipalities. Iowa, 
Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Connecticut, Dela- 
ware, Colorado, Nebraska, West Virginia, and 
Texas have commissions studying the question. 
There is considerable variation in the provisions 
of the laws as passed. By most of them only 
'^hazardous'' or *^ dangerous^' occupations are 
affected. A uniform law for all the States, pro- 
posed in a draft for compulsory compensation in 
dangerous occupations, has been prepared by the 
American Federation of Labor. Another sub- 
mitted by the National Civic Federation, contains 
unessential differences on points of phraseology 
and provision. A draft has also been issued for 
*^ Compulsory State insurance if practical, other- 
wise compulsory compensation,'^ by what is 
known as the *^ Chicago Conference, '^ in which 
the American Association for Labor Legislation 



56 THE WAGE EAENEES 

was a prime mover, and tlie American Bar Asso- 
ciation has declared in favor of the enactment of 
'^ uniform laws for compensation for industrial 
accidents'' by ^^all the States and by the United 
States within its jurisdiction." 

Space permits of no discussion here of the 
merits of these various laws and bills. Difficulties 
in the whole problem are suggested by their 
variety and their inapplicability to industry in 
general. The steps thus far made in the different 
States taking action, and the failure of the other 
States to take any action, together with the diver- 
gences in principles, methods, application, and 
possible effectiveness of the laws adopted, all 
leave the situation far from satisfactory. 

Among other propositions before the country, 
there is one for a Federal insurance tax, to be 
collected and disbursed by mutual associations, 
divided by trades, as in Germany. The iron and 
steel trades, for example, would by this method 
have employers and employes in one association, 
paying each year a tax equaling what would be 
necessary to meet the benefits, plus a reasonable 
amount for reserve, continuously, as long as li- 
ability lasts, and during widowhood of wives and 
orphanage of children. Among the supporters of 
this system are lawyers and insurance men who 
assert their belief in its constitutionality. It 
would fall under that provision of the Federal 
constitution which authorizes the collection of 



AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 57 

taxes ^^to promote the general welfare/' This 
proposition is worthy of serious consideration. 
Its advocates affirm that it is framed on a stndy 
of the results to date of the German system. There 
is pending in Congress a bill establishing compen- 
sation for workmen employed on interstate rail- 
roads. This bill was recommended as a result of 
exhaustive investigation made by a Federal com- 
mission. 

Meantime, while the States are proceeding 
separately, tentatively, and in uncertainty, the 
United States remains, for example, the only in- 
dustrial nation on earth that maintains, as it does 
in perhaps 90 per cent, of its accident cases, the 
old system of liability based on negligence ! 

Our wage earners in general hold that industry 
should bear the burden of the pecuniary loss sus- 
tained by workmen through industrial accidents. 
Associated with many men of altruistic character 
who are not wage workers, representative labor 
men are discussing the subject, their expectation 
being that finally a law, or a set of laws, will be 
evolved which will constitutionally afford to the 
victims of industrial accidents, or in case of death 
their dependent survivors, if not automatic com- 
pensation without cost, a system of insurance 
yielding all the benefits of such compensation and 
adding nothing to the burdens of the wage 
earners. Every good citizen would naturally de- 



58 THE WAGE EAENEES 

sire to see the United States removed from the 
unenviable position it holds among the nations in 
this respect today. The task onght not to be 
beyond American ingenuity and statesmanship. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE WAGE EABNEBS AKD INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY. 

^^ Efficiency, '^ within the last year or two, has 
had ^4ts day in court." Eather, it has been made 
one of those sensational topics which from time 
to time get a hearing in that big forum of the 
American press to which, while the discussion 
is novel, are admitted pleaders pro and con. 
Whether the live subject in the public eye relates 
to politics, economics, ethics, or mechanics, the 
spectators (the great public) take up with it 
awhile, permit the orators to have their say on it, 
and then turn their attention to the next ^'film.'^ 
However, with respect to any one of the causes 
thus brought forward, there is usually a part of 
the great mass directly interested. This, a group 
of itself, continues to study its particular subject 
after the first flurry over it, and, subdividing in 
the debate, sets to work the one section to pro- 
mote and the other to defeat an advance of the 
disputed idea. Finally, society adopts the idea 
or its principle, in part or as a whole, in accor- 
dance with what in it is sound and useful, or else, 
persisting in looking upon it as a dead issue, or 
a past fashion, stands impervious. 

^^ Efficiency '^ has quickly dropped off quite to 
the limits of group discussion. Already the body 



60 THE WAGE EARNERS 

of spectators in the big auditorium demand for 
the arena fresh thrillers, new voices, novel acts, 
or show themselves eager for a sight of the grand 
old gladiators performing time-honored plays, 
especially the politicaL 

But, for its brief hour, '^Efficiency'' had a 
great run. It was unexpectedly set out on the 
stage in the national coliseum in a single day. A 
very distinguished and amiable lover of mankind, 
who temporarily obtained place at the megaphone, 
proclaimed that he knew how the nation could 
save a million dollars a day in but one branch of 
its multifarious concerns. That startling an- 
nouncement was sufficient to cause the mighty 
audience to demand a demonstration. It is true, 
a goodly number of the spectators had already 
seen the unexpectedly heralded industrial playlet 
in a freak side-show, were familiar with its ex- 
aggerations on the boards, and more than suspect- 
ed its true purpose. In its ^'try-out" on a large 
scale, which followed, its original managers were 
joined by many volunteer coadjutors, not wholly 
welcome to them, not recognized by them as 
staunchly orthodox, and who, perhaps, distorted 
their plot or misapplied or magnified its moral. 

Quite within the expectations of reason, the 
great public soon had before it volumes of propo- 
sitions to re-form, re-adjust, and re-lubricate the 
wheels which run any and all of our social insti- 
tutions — the law-making mills, the courts, the 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 61 

professions, the administrations of city, State, 
and nation. Before long, little old-fashioned 
points in efficiency gave way before comprehen- 
sive theories for attaining universal perfection. 
What was mere shop management to the read- 
justment of all the systems of construction and 
transportation? What was mere good housekeep- 
ing to the science of city planning? What petty 
individual thrift to collective co-operation? What 
ordinary parental duties to race-elevating eugen- 
ics? 

It was thus the fate of pure and simple ^^ ef- 
ficiency^' to be swamped in a stream of fact and 
fiction itself had started running. When Mr. 
Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal Audit 
Company of New York, before a Congressional 
committee investigating the subject, slightingly 
referred to *^the Taylor system'' of scientific 
management as *^only one little bit of detail" of 
^^the whole subject of industrial efficiency,'' the 
country apparently deemed him hardly any more 
absurd than Mr. Taylor. When Mr. Brandeis, 
speaking to the great captains of the railway in- 
terests, told them he had experts at command 
willing to show them, in their inexpertness, the 
way to save yearly hundreds of millions, the 
small subject of shop economics dropped down 
beyond the horizon. When efficiency engineers — 
in business as individuals, firms, and corporations 
— started up all over the laixd, with suggestions 



62 THE WAGE EAENERS 

for legerdemain in every mode of human proce- 
dure, the voluminous extolling of Mr. Taylor and 
his system of ^'scientific management'' by his 
^^write-np" journalists seemed a waste of print- 
er's ink. 

Certainly it is true that at many points our 
civilization is but half-baked. Nothing, yet, goes 
just right. Perfection is far off. Draw close to 
any one of the professions — teaching, for instance 
— and you find a confusion of critics' voices cry- 
ing chaos. Medicine has a dozen variant schools ; 
surely most of them must teach more or less of 
error. Supreme courts divide — five to four. As 
for religion, let us here maintain a respectful 
silence. It is to be granted, measurement of in- 
accuracies, of method or movement, in these 
spheres cannot be taken with geometrical preci- 
sion. Nevertheless, when efficiency is the theme, 
unbiased inquirers are warranted in objecting to 
being shown only the comparatively small area 
in which the stop-watch is the supreme test. 
Especially is the wage worker justified in calling 
out to the audience that it is unfair that ^' effi- 
ciency" should select him as the one horrible ex- 
ample while sinners in so many other social 
categories must be worse than he, since he, of all 
others, truly is a worker, the one performing the 
tasks essential to society. 

Now, that's the point in the wage worker's ob- 
jection to Mr. Taylor's playlet, '^ Efficiency." In 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 63 

its scenes Mr. Taylor has made his caricature of 
the workingman the villain, has the limelight full 
upon him without cease, and, professing for him 
a saintly benevolence, has the other leading char- 
acter, Big Capital, sweat him, cheat him, deceive 
him, and on the whole exploit his time, his mus- 
cles, his nerves, his whole bodily mechanism in- 
humanly. The real workingman, in the audience, 
resents the falsification of his character. He 
thinks it fair that the limelight should be turned 
on the other classes of men engaged in manufac- 
ture, business, commerce, or in any social role 
whatever, and the stop-watch or the microscope 
used on them. Let them be seen publicly, in full, 
just as they are, their demerits unexaggerated. 
The wage earner believes he would issue from 
such a ^'try-out," level with the best. 

The wage earner, as the most deeply interested 
man in the industrial group engaged in discussing 
Mr. Taylor's ^^ Efficiency," with its Emerson- 
Gantt-Gilbreth & Co. additions and corrections, is 
prepared to submit to the public some views of 
his own regarding its alleged facts and undoubted 
teachings. These views may thus be summarized : 
It is libelously untrue that *^ soldiering" to any- 
thing like the extent described by Mr. Taylor, is 
characteristic of American workmen. There is 
no available statistical basis for the statement 
that 50,000 employes are today working under 
the Taylor scheme. The system is not rapidly 



64 THE WAGE EAENERS 

spreading ; it has been dropped in some large 
works where it was once in practice. Its use in 
government arsenals has been in large measure 
condemned by a Congressional commission, after 
careful investigation. It has, where tried, been 
far from a uniform success. In no case has there 
been more than a half-truth in the statement 
made by its promoters that ^Hhe system raises 
wages.'' The higher wages to be earned by the 
small proportion of workmen speeded up to its 
requirements are inevitably subject eventually to 
that law of economics by which competition in an 
over-stocked market lowers prices ; hence the per- 
sistent professions of the promoters of efficiency, 
that they intend to raise wages, must count as 
naught. What it has done, as to wages, has been 
to raise them temporarily for a small proportion 
of a force and lower them for mechanics in gen- 
eral, while depriving a portion, through unem- 
ployment, of any wage at all. The system un- 
doubtedly found origin in socially unreputable 
sources — the Midvale and Bethlehem companies. 
It is rarely, if ever, practicable in small shops. 
Its applications are chiefly to be found in con- 
nection with operations which are uniform and 
repeated indefinitely, and together represent but 
a few simple phases of the machinist's trade, 
which is characterized by a multiplicity of prac- 
tical problems involving intricate movements. 
Efficiency — scientific management — as a compre- 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 65 

hensive industrial and social proposition has been 
absurdly overtrumpeted, Mr. Taylor's own claims 
frequently being the basis. It obviously is inap- 
plicable to most of the work measured only by 
time, the unit in a large percentage of all industry 
and other service. It is not a fact, as its sup- 
porters assert, that efficiency has proceeded with- 
out occasioning strikes. It is a fact that efficiency 
is interwoven with the piece and bonus and con- 
tract and fining systems, with their burdens and 
abuses. 

Let us review this summary and cite facts bear- 
ing upon its points. As to the industrial disease 
of ^ ^ soldiering, ' ' Mr. Taylor, writing of the Mid- 
vale works, says: ^^The workmen together had 
carefully planned just how fast each job should 
be done, and they had set a pace for each machine, 
which amounted to about one-third of a good 
day's worf In his edition of ^'Shop Manage- 
ment,'' Mr. Taylor writes of ^^most of the men in 
the shop" that they ^^will 'soldier' " to the ex- 
tent of three or four hundred per cent, if allowed 
to do so. This charge against the American 
workingman, it is to be clearly understood, is the 
starting point of Mr. Taylor's system. He de- 
picts, in a vivid coloring, a sort of detestable 
cancer, with intent to follow up his diagnosis with 
his cure-all. He thus presents to us the played- 
out methods of the magic soap advertiser. His 
exaggerations are apparent to all employers and 



66 THE WAGE EARNERS 

employes of average experience ; as they must be 
also to all persons of common sense. As a matter 
of fact, if a force of workmen slionld loaf away 
only one-half their time, it would pay to employ 
one supervising taskmaster to every three men, 
to do nothing but watch that the workers each 
should do a fair day's work. This indictment of 
the wage-earning classes by Mr. Taylor has been 
demonstrated by Mr. Gompers to be a stupid 
libel. Its complete refutation being of the first 
importance, Mr. Gompers' treatment of the point 
is here quoted. 

^^It would offend the common sense of even the 
casual observer to maintain that piecework rates 
usually lead to ^soldiering.' It is the universal 
testimony of men who have earned their wages 
at piecework that the tendency to speeding up 
comes from the man himself. He wants the high- 
est amount of wages possible on Saturday night. 
Now, what proportion of the wage earners in this 
nation are engaged in piecework? Here is a list 
of occupations in which it is more or less common : 

^^ Bakers, barbers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, 
bookbinders, boot and shoe workers, broom and 
whisk makers, brushmakers, car workers, chain- 
makers, cigarmakers, cloth hat and cap makers, 
coopers, lace curtain operatives, watch case en- 
gravers, fur workers, garment workers, glass bot- 
tle^ blowers, ^love workers, pocket knife blade 
grinders and finishers, table knife grinders, hat- 
ters, iron, steel, and tin workers ; jewelry workers, 
lathers, leather workers, lithographic pressfeed- 
ers, longshoremen, metal polishers, coal and 
metalliferous miners, molders, plate printers, pot- 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 67 

ters; pulp, sulphite, and paper mill workers; 
shingle weavers, stove mounters, tailors, textile 
workers, tin workers, printers, upholsterers, 
elastic goring weavers, wire weavers, wood work- 
ers, and other minor callings too numerous to 
mention. 

^^When this list is studied, the reader sees at 
once a direct contradiction in this considerable 
proportion of industry of Doctor Taylor's asser- 
tion as to the extent of the plague of ^soldiering' 
or deliberate inefficiency. 

^^What as to the large class of occupations 
which move by time-table? Take as an example 
the passenger trains or the electric street-car 
systems throughout the United States. We have 
in view in this category many other occupations, 
including elevator running, all forms of police 
work, the officials great and small engaged in 
steamship transportation. In the same class fall 
cooks, waiters, hotel and restaurant help in gen- 
eral. In fact, we have, further, actors, stationary 
engineers and firemen, musicians, postoffice clerks, 
carriers, telegraphers, salesmen, and many stage 
employes. Is it possible for men in these occu- 
pations to deliver a third of a day's work for a 
full day's work? 

^^ Another classification is of wage earners on 
timework whose output may be measured. Among 
these^ as examples, are bakery and confectionery 
workers, barbers, bill posters, blacksmiths, boot 
and shoe workers, garment cutters, bottle blowers, 
glove workers, hatters, much work done by litho- 
graphers and printers, especially those in the com- 
posing-room." 



68 THE WAGE EAENERS 

If ^^ soldiering'' were as common as Mr. Taylor 
describes it, his thirty years of crusading against 
it might reasonably have brought five million 
wage earners nnder his system. He claims fifty 
thousand. Former president James O'Connell, 
International Association of Machinists, testify- 
ing before the Congressional committee of in- 
quiry on the subject, said that at the Watertown 
Arsenal, where the system had been in use for a 
couple of years, it had only reached a very small 
percentage of the employes, but he supposed it 
would be claimed that all were under the Taylor 
system ; possibly by this method of calculation the 
total of fifty thousand had been made out. Mr. 
Taylor's book gives no census of his forced con- 
verts or list of the places where they work. So 
far as may be judged by press accounts, Mr. 
Taylor's list is suffering losses. Of his system, 
James J. Hill said: ^^It is all rot; it has cost 
the Santa Fe Railroad a million dollars to try it, 
and they have abandoned it." Machinist dele- 
gates told the Congressional committee that it 
had been given up by the American Locomotive 
Company and — ^^most unkindest cut of all" — the 
Bethlehem Steel Company, favorite scene of the 
^'efficiency engineers' " earlier stop-watch per- 
formances. 

^ Newspaper readers are becoming familiar with 
strikes against the system. The Rock Island 
Arsenal men struck through the means safest to 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 69 

government employes; they tackled Congress 
about it. A division of the Watertown employes 
walked ont. At the Philadelphia plant of the 
Keystone "Watch Case Company nearly 200 un- 
organized men struck against the stop-watch sys- 
tem. The American wage earner may gain the 
impression that he has been already rushed quite 
to the reasonable limit when he contemplates the 
usual reference-book table of the comparative 
annual productivity of workmen. It runs : 

American — $2,450 

Canadian 1,455 

Australian 900 

French 640 

English - - 556 

German 460 

As to raising wages, two points come in view. 
(1) To what extent has ^^ efficiency" raised 
wages? (2) Have its advocates any warrant in 
prophesying that the wage workers accepting it 
will not have their wages lowered? Here are 
plain, undeniable facts which bear on both these 
points : In all the stock examples of the efficiency 
program the survivors of the original force have 
obtained, as alleged, for the time being, an in- 
crease. But the helpers, the performers of the 
preliminary motions dropped from the high- 
priced workman ^s routine, the ^^ handy men'^ who 
are substitutes for mechanics qualified for the 



70 THE WAGE EAENEES 

trade, all take only the wage of the unskilled labor 
market. We find in the index to Mr. Taylor's 
book no reference to his admission (page 82) of 
a reduction in the wages of stop-watch lathe men 
at ^^the beginning of the recent fall in the scale 
of wages thronghont the country." Here is a 
clear concession to the law of competition which 
reduces wages in an overstocked labor market. 
And since Mr. Taylor does not fail to point out 
that a logical result of his system is the destruc- 
tion of the trade union, what power is to stand 
against reductions in wages, down to the lowest 
level at which stop-watch workmen may be hired 
in dull times by that portion of unscrupulous and 
greedy employers which exists in all branches of 
industry? 

An imminent cause of a break-down in applied 
stop-watch, high tension, piecework efficiency lies 
in the graft its ^differential rate" opens up for 
the employer on the employe. The highest limit 
of a machine and its human operator being as- 
certained, to be entitled to the bonus above the 
flat wage, this high point or one closely approach- 
ing it must be reached and maintained by all 
employes engaged in the same class of work. 
When the stint is not reached and only the flat 
wage consequently paid, the result may ])e a con- 
fiscation by the employer of the production above 
the usual fair day's quantity. Hear Mr. Taylor 
on this point: ''With the differential rate, if for 



AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 71 

any reason he [the workman] fails to do his full 
task, he not only loses the large extra premium 
which is paid for complete success, but in ad- 
dition he suffers the direct loss of the piece price 
for each piece by which he falls short." Now, 
it is easy for the work to '^run bad," making it 
impossible for the operative to attain the high 
limit. This is the case in the textile industry, as 
found on investigation by the trade union. Metal 
workers find in the variable degree of hardness 
of the material a factor which baffles records. 
"Weather counts both ways in out-door work. In 
all such cases, who is to decide for or against the 
worker who may attribute his shortage of output 
to causes beyond his control? "With no trade 
union, many abuses could be practiced with little 
effective opposition. 

The prospect of what may come about through 
the introduction of this system brings to the shop 
worker's mind unpleasant recollections of what he 
has seen taking place under driving foremen and 
selfish employers. For example, there is Mr. Tay- 
lor's own limited view of the moralities, the social 
and patriotic objects, the human influences possi- 
ble to shop work — an edifying conception, given in 
these words: ^^All employes should bear in mind 
that each shop exists first, last, and all the time 
for the purpose of paying dividends to its own- 
ers." Why, then, in employing labor or in any 
other transaction should the employer stop short 



72 THE WAGE EARNERS 

of anything that will not send him to jail? Or, 
again there are the views of President Harrah, of 
the Midvale Company, as expressed before the 
Committee on Labor of the House of Representa- 
tives in 1900: ^^We have the most improved kind 
of machinery now; but we make it a rule to run a 
machine to break.'' '^We have absolutely no re- 
gard for machinery or for men." Or, again, 
there was the Triangle Waist Factory, with its 
speeded-up sewing machines, the operators back 
to back in rows with hardly room to move, the 
operating room doors locked, insufficient exits, 
systems of fines — every point considered and cal- 
culated to bring dividends. Every point, except 
the shop afire. 

Intensely unpleasant to the real workingman is 
the caricature of the workingman brought out on 
the stage in the first scene of ^'Efficiency" — a 
loafer, studying how to avoid fulfilling his obliga- 
tions with an employer. Almost equally disagree- 
able is Mr. Taylor's ideal of a workman as pre- 
sented in the final scenes of his work — a human 
automaton, in the social status of a convict. Nor 
has Mr. Taylor been at all successful with the 
other leading character of his playlet — the em- 
ployer. He brings him on the boards in too many 
disguises — as Benevolence, increasing wages — as 
Science, working wonders in the stage properties 
of bonus, piecework, and stint ; as Political Econ- 
omy saving the nation a lot of work — all these, 



AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 73 

only to let this hero take down his mask in the last 
act and show himself, barefaced, as plain Divi- 
dend Hunter. 

As to the extent to which the practice of effi- 
ciency may unsettle trade unionism, in the present 
subdivision of trades and the varying levels of 
skilled and unskilled labor, the wage workers 
hardly need to be overanxious. It takes two to 
five years, according to Mr. Taylor, to get appre- 
ciable returns from his system, and then it may 
tumble to pieces, like a house of cards, as it seems 
to have done at Bethlehem. Some branches of 
efficiency, such as the bricklaying, require such a 
considerable pyramid of a force, with assistants 
at stage after stage in the work, that it may long 
continue most profitable to depend on just brick- 
layers to do the run of ordinary jobs. In the trade 
of the machinist it can hardly be possible to abol- 
ish from use an amount of skill and technical 
knowledge that forms one of the elements of the 
wealth of our country, simply by turning over to 
laborers certain movements that take endless 
repetition. Nor are our well-laid plans for indus- 
trial education to be undone in a day by the stop- 
watch. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WAGE.EAEISTEES AND THE JUDICIAEY. 

To ^^ respect .the courts'' is an admonitory call 
so often made on the workingman that he has 
formulated for general consideration a counter- 
call. He cannot condense it in another three 
words. His response to the implied criticism ad- 
dressed him might properly begin with some in- 
quiry as to what class in society habitually shows 
more respect than his own for the judiciary as an 
institution. Do the politicians, for instance ? Do 
the ^^ captains of industry"? He believes that in 
their sphere judges ought to be experts and ac- 
cordingly appreciated. He understands that 
order, that prime essential to society, depends 
largely on obedience to the bench. He knows that 
as the law is, so society is and vice versa, and that 
accordingly as the law is well or badly adminis- 
tered so much the better or the worse for all 
classes, including the wage workers. To these 
familiar commonplace generalities he assents, 
without argument. 

But, is it the duty of the workingman so to rev- 
erence the courts that he should regard their de- 
cisions as above the range of his discussion? 
Should he maintain and express no judgment of 
his own on his constitutional or inherent rights ? 



AND THE JUDICIARY 75 

Queries such as these might appear absurd were 
it not that inexperienced persons often make a 
show of indignation when told that the decision of 
any court is to be opposed. ^^ Why did you not obey 
the court and so avoid making yourself liable to 
a jail sentence?" was in substance asked by a 
woman in an audience which had been addressed 
by me on some phases of labor's rights. Appar- 
ently she regarded questioning any court's con- 
clusions as disobedience to the law or at least evi- 
dence of a lawless spirit. She had given no 
weight to the one important fact that an appeal 
through legal form is a justifiable opposition to 
a court possibly in error. She had not under- 
stood that contesting a lower court's decision 
clear up to the highest court, especially in a case 
involving a constitutional right, or a legal point 
not fully settled, might be a patriotic duty. 

To a considerable extent, ignorance, akin to this 
woman's, is the foundation of a more or less gen- 
eral impression, which organized labor's critics 
would have stand for public opinion, that the 
American workingman is ' ' against the courts, ' ' is 
in fact in the habit of denouncing and disobeying 
them. 

What is true in this charge is that the organized 
working-classes are of necessity at the present 
time obliged to direct the attention of the coun- 
try to what they believe are errors or shortcom- 
ings in certain proceedings of law courts with re- 



76 THE WAGE EAENERS 

gard to labor questions wMch are unsettled and 
which, it now seems, can only be settled through 
a social process involving several stages. These 
questions require first to be discussed publicly. 
Their reply will involve defining the limits within 
which courts may act ; courts are not to encroach 
on rights of the citizen which will be clearly estab- 
lished, and they are to be assigned their unques- 
tionably proper place relative to the lawmaking 
and executive departments of our government. 
One important result of this process will be that in 
their judgments the courts will apply principles of 
human rights which today are accepted by the en- 
lightened majority, not only of this country, but 
all civilized countries. 

The first of these questions is the matter of dis- 
cussing the fallibility of the courts themselves, as 
especially shown in the inconsistency of their find- 
ings on the problems incident to the development 
of our new industrial society. Certain points in 
this primary inquiry are now up before the coun- 
try in urgent form. Is there a tendency among 
our judges to lag behind general progress in the 
acceptance of certain principles of sociology true 
in the opinion of nearly all men whose daily ex- 
periences or studies bring before their minds the 
social effects of the new industrial conditions? 
Are those ^^ rights of persons, '' made obvious to 
the working-class by the facts of life as they now 
are, accorded in the courts equal consideration 



AND THE JUDICIAEY 77 

with the ''rights of things/' as established gen- 
erations ago, when the worker was little more than 
a dumb and dependent chattel? On this point, the 
most conspicuous facts as regards the courts can- 
not be dwelt upon too emphatically. In deciding 
cases involving labor's claims, a judge has before 
him in every instance two practically contra- 
dictory sets of precedents. He may give primary 
importance and preponderant weight to the prece- 
dents immediately affecting human rights, the 
personal rights which lie in the category that prin- 
cipally concerns the masses; or he may take the 
contrary view, from another chain of precedents 
that legal rights are for the most part concretely 
represented in property. In Man vs. The Dollar, 
the judge, guided by a line of legally valid prece- 
dents, may be inclined to award judgment to a 
substance, property, in contradistinction to what 
may seem to him to be comparatively a shadow, 
namely, rights disassociated from material pos- 
sessions. 

When the wage worker, in arguing to society 
his cause relative to the courts, has established 
the fact of the fallibility of judges and of the reas- 
onableness of his query as to a tendency existing 
among them to follow the precedents which in his 
opinion stand as obstacles to the just protection 
of the lives and the rights of the masses of men, he 
is next prepared to state definitely what he holds 
certain of these rights to be. As a good and 



78 THE WAGE EAENEES 

worthy citizen, he is ready to contend for such 
rights — in the courts, in the public forum, and at 
the polls. He has been taught that a right worth 
having is worth fighting for, and that a right neg- 
lected must be brought forward by the man who 
ought to possess and exercise it. In conducting 
this struggle the wage earner surely is guilty of 
no impropriety in pointing out where, in his opin- 
ion, judges have ignored his rights, and where 
their action has been a violation of the funda- 
mental principles of our republic. Moreover, cer- 
tain of these rights are today pressing for an im- 
mediate and definite recognition. One of them is, 
the wage earner's right of exercising free speech 
and of maintaining a free press, and in regard to 
these is to be defined the just limit of a court's 
interference with a citizen's utterances, in spoken 
or printed word. Very important practical ques- 
tions next follow closely. What are the constitu- 
tional limits to a court injunction in labor dis- 
putes? What act relative to an order from the 
bench constitutes a contempt of court? Is the 
wage worker to exercise freely his right to dis- 
pose of his labor as he wills? Is he to exercise 
his right to control his purchasing power as he 
wills? How far may he go in inducing another 
wage earner to join him in an action which in his 
judgment promotes benefits to both ? What are a 
union man's rights on the highway? May an or- 
ganization of wage earners refuse to work with 



AND THE JUDICIAEY 79 

men objectionable to them? Is it a crime for a 
group of men to do that which it is legal for one of 
their number to do ? How long is the bench to be 
free to play off the always dubious principle of 
^ ^freedom of contract" against the manifest and 
imperative principle of "the general welfare," to 
the destruction of many forms of just protection 
of the men, women and children engaged in indus- 
try? Until these questions are answered authori- 
tatively, once and for all, organized labor will be 
the prey of combined enemies having as instru- 
ments shrewd counsel under fee and as legal agen- 
cies courts who place in the way of labor what- 
ever barriers can be formed out of the vestiges of 
the legal compulsion which held sway when labor 
was hardly above the status of serfdom. 

For the wage worker to hold that courts are 
fallible, and to keep the fact well forward in con- 
tending for what he regards as his rights, so far 
from manifesting disrespect, is merely acting 
upon what has been taught him by the State in 
establishing a system of checks in the hierarchy of 
courts as well as by the constantly differing opin- 
ions of judges themselves. The gradations of 
courts, the higher possessing revisionary powers 
over the lower, result in exhibiting error in a 
large percentage of the lower courts' decisions, or 
at least differences in the practical effect of their 
conclusions as compared with those of the courts 
above them. Majority rule on a divided bench 



80 THE WAGE EAENEES 

indicates fallibility in one of the parties to the di- 
vision, and in the course of a session of a court of 
several members each may find himself in the 
minority on one or more decisions, in which case 
he is entitled to regard the majority as fallible. 
To organized labor, bringing to the courts ques- 
tions springing from modernized industry, the 
judges have furnished continual illustrations of in- 
adaptability either to one another's views or to 
prevailing public opinion. Their decisions on these 
questions have also shown their tendencies as dis- 
putants to place an emphasis on either one or the 
other amid conflicting principles. The series of 
results of the split-up of the Court of Appeals of 
New York in 1904 in finding, by a vote of four to 
one, that the eight-hour act passed in that State in 
1897 was unconstitutional, was from several 
points of view worth a law-college education to 
the labor men of the country. Two members of 
the court regarded the act as an interference by 
the Legislature with a right of the municipality, 
and therefore unconstitutional. Two others, to 
whose minds it deprived an individual of property 
without due process of law, also found it unconsti- 
tutional. But the fifth judge, accepting it as a 
police regulation in the interest of public health 
and morality, maintained that it was constitu- 
tional. Judicial confusion leaving the matter in 
this shape, the people of the State took it up and 
by the aid of a judge-proof constitutional amend- 



AND THE JUDICIARY 81 

ment passed an eight-hour act, the terms of which 
tallied with provisions the United States Supreme 
Court had declared valid in the Kansas eight-hour 
law. 

On the likelihood of judges varying in their 
views of elementary legal principles, one or the 
other of which by this time ought to be an estab- 
lished basis of our public policy, the judicial 
course on the New York ten-hour bakery act is 
witness. By a vote of four to three, the State 
Court of Appeals held that the statute was a 
proper exercise of the police power and therefore 
constitutional. But in the United States Supreme 
Court five judges to four held the law to be un- 
constitutional on the ground that it attempted an 
arbitrary interference with the freedom of con- 
tract. 

The gist of the lesson to the wage earner in 
these various decisions is that the principles of 
the law which may be invoked in regard to such 
statutes are but few and easily understood, while 
each is an instrument to be grasped and employed 
with a desired effect by interested litigants. 

Not only does one see plainly in these typical 
cases that judges are fallible, but also that they 
may be swayed by personal associations and in- 
clinations. That being the fact, the aspirations 
for justice of the wage-working masses may be 
sufficient motive and warrant in endeavoring to 
establish their own views of justice. 



82 . THE WAGE EAENERS 

Their opponents may reasonably set out to 
demonstrate that the principles of a law which the 
wage earners propose cannot be aligned with rea- 
son and justice, that the law would lead to heavier 
burdens on society, or that under it the wage- 
earners themselves would be the chief sufferers. 
But to charge the wage earners with disrespect 
for the judiciary because they criticise, even in 
severe terms, the views held by certain judges is 
diverting attention from the essential subject to 
an incidental point. It is begging the question. 
The wage earner may pertinently call attention to 
the fact, recorded in Bigelow's ^^ Overruled 
Cases," that as far back as 1873 the appellate 
courts had overruled nearly ten thousand of their 
own decisions. Yet he could still respect the 
courts, accordingly. 

Impervious to any superstition that there are 
principles in law or government which he may not 
presume to discuss, as may other laymen, the 
wage worker is prepared to assert his rights to 
free speech and a free press. To bring comment 
on this principle at once to a concrete point, refer- 
ence may be made to the opinion regarding it offi- 
cially rendered by Chief Justice Shepard, of the 
Supreme Court, District of Columbia. Referring 
to the constitutional inhibition of any abridg- 
ment of the freedom of speech or the press. 
Justice Shepard said from the bench, with regard 
to an injunction order issued by a lower court of 



AND THE JUDICIAEY 83 

tlie District, that acts of publication by the de- 
fendants which violated parts of the lower court's 
decree exceeding its constitutional powers were 
not causes for legal penalities. He quoted Justice 
Miller, of the United States Supreme Court, as de- 
ciding that a decree punishing a man for contempt 
of court because he refused to comply with an 
order which the court had no authority to make, 
was void. Now, organized labor men have learned 
that in injunctions issued against them there may 
be, not only quite a list of acts forbidden them 
which were already illegal and which they had no 
intention of committing, but also a number of acts 
which they are confident a reviewing court will de- 
clare legal, which, indeed, courts have repeatedly 
recognized as legal, and in such case the labor men 
stand firmly on their rights as they know them, 
and to that extent, driven to an extremity, they 
may disobey a court's orders. When a labor offi- 
cial, defending as in duty bound the rights of the 
members of his organization as citizens, makes the 
declaration that if a court should enjoin him from 
doing something he had a legal, constitutional, 
and moral right to do, he would violate the injunc- 
tion, he is actually upholding the law and showing 
his regard for what is to be the final action of the 
higher courts. When he declares before the coun- 
try that he will utter his deliberate and conscien- 
tious thought, through speech or in print, he is 
positive he is within his constitutional right. He 



84 THE WAGE EAENEES 

has legal opinions in fortifying numbers to the 
effect that no court can forbid his uttering his 
thoughts, though naturally he expects to abide by 
the consequences of his speaking or publishing in 
so doing. He pits his conception of a fundamental 
social principle against that of the lower courts, 
confident that the judgment of the higher courts, 
and certain that the judgment of time, will be on 
his side. 

Organized labor asks this country today to lay 
down the limitations of the courts in the matter of 
injimctions in labor disputes. It wishes to know 
where it stands with regard to points continually 
coming up in judicial injunctions. It wants to get 
rid of the burden of going up again and again to 
the higher courts to have inhibitions eliminated 
from injunctions that have been repeatedly ad- 
judged as beyond the powers of courts to issue. 
Labor officials nowadays on reading a fresh in- 
junction, probably drawn up by an employer's at- 
torney and merely signed by the judge, can them- 
selves blue-pencil off the clauses which a higher 
court will declare null and void. But meantime, 
during a formal hearing or appeal, labor will have 
lost its rightful position in the impending dis- 
pute. Its opponents will have enjoyed the unfair 
advantage of using a court as their aid. To or- 
ganized labor, the imperfections in court work, 
only some of which have been referred to, form a 
greater obstacle to reaching industrial peace than 



AND THE JUDICIAEY 85 

the strength of the union's opponents in disputes. 
If the employers defeat a strike, the union sees the 
cause of its set-back to be in the labor market or 
in its own defects, or other obvious cause which 
time may remedy. But if the courts defeat a 
strike, the employers gain only a respite and both 
the employes engaged and their fellow-unionists 
are embittered. Eventually they become stronger 
in unionism, less disposed to friendly overtures, 
and often they turn their attention mainly to 
forms of radical relief. 

Usually labor obeys injunctions. Of forty-six 
issued in Massachusetts in eleven years in labor 
cases, in nine instances only was there disobedi- 
ence, and in only one of these by persons named 
in the injunction. But this is not the point on 
which pertinent argument today turns. It is only 
since 1890 that courts in equity have by means of 
injunctions been so encroaching on theretofore 
recognized rights of labor that the necessity has 
arisen to make clear the rightful limits of the 
powers of judges so acting. Contemporaneously 
with agitation and inquiry in this respect, other 
legal disqualifications of labor in the United 
States have perforce engaged the attention and 
enlisted the reformatory efforts of organized 
workmen. Consequently the wage earners are 
urgently asking questions of the courts and the 
law-givers. If Great Britain can so arrange that 
trade union funds are protected from legalized 



86 THE WAGE EAENERS 

raids in consequence of labor disputes, it seems 
reasonable to look for similar protection in our 
country. If picketing during a lock-out or a strike 
is recognized as legal by the United States Su- 
preme Court, it might be grounds for prohibiting 
a city council from passing an ordinance forbid- 
ding it. If the men of conspicuous legal capabili- 
ties who compose the Judiciary Committee of the 
national House of Representatives can frame a 
bill defining conspiracy and taking away from the 
courts the power to issue injunctions against 
unions acting by orderly methods in furtherance 
of a labor dispute, why cannot such a bill become 
a law and be observed by the courts ? If compen- 
sation to workmen for injuries sustained in the 
course of employment can be adopted as an indus- 
trial principle by the other great nations of the 
earth, it is a strange commentary on our national 
intellectual status if our people tolerate legal ob- 
stacles to its enforcement here. If organizers of 
the proletariat, preaching doctrines subversive of 
its government, can hold meetings everywhere in 
the German Empire, it ought to be made a cer- 
tainty that our trade union organizers, teaching 
principles strictly in accordance with the constitu- 
tion and the laws of this country, could not be or- 
dered out of Pennsylvania or West Virginia min- 
ing or iron manufacturing districts by sheriffs or 
constables. If laws limiting the hours of labor for 



AND THE JUDICIARY 87 

women are held to be constitutional in one State, 
it ought to be taken for granted — though it can- 
not — that similar laws should be constitutional in 
other States. Now, on all the points thus brought 
under our observation, the demand arises for the 
establishment of foundation principles in the stat- 
utes, to be consistently observed and uniformly 
administered by the public officials. Who can 
rightly blame labor for decrying the defects of the 
laws that fail to extend to it the protection given 
in other countries ? Is there any reasonable basis 
for wonder that labor entertains projects of itself 
directly influencing the law through its votes ? 

Labor is not listening to the voice of anarchy. 
It would replace the present anarchy by stable 
laws. For better or worse, it would have the ques- 
tions affecting labor which will not down, and 
which have baffled our legislatures and our courts, 
answered definitely, one way or another, for or 
against labor's convictions. 

The bench in America has been the last institu- 
tion to awaken to the greatest of all modern prob- 
lems. To indicate how the attitude of the courts 
with respect to this problem is regarded by the 
leaders of a most conservative movement, this ex- 
cerpt from an editorial in ^^The Survey'' may aid: 

'^ Those who feel that they have a grievance 
against the courts because of their attitude on so- 



88 THE WAGE EARNEES 

cial and economic questions may choose among 
several lines of action. One is to educate the 
judges on the particular questions in which they 
are interested. Another is to seek, through the re- 
call and similar means, to keep the courts in har- 
mony with public sentiment. Still another is to 
remove from the courts the power to interpret 
statutes and to determine their constitutionality, 
leaving the former function to some administra- 
tive department, and the latter, as in England, to 
the legislature. ' ' 

When consideration of such sentiments and 
such propositions is seriously given in a magazine 
of foremost standing in the circles whose first aim 
is to systematize and give the highest efficiency to 
the philanthropic impulses of the community, 
rather than to economic readjustment, it serves to 
show that intelligent opinion among those inti- 
mately acquainted with needs affecting the de- 
prived classes is, not that fault is to be found with 
organized labor, but that general disappointment 
has been caused through the backwardness and, in 
prominent cases, perversity of the courts. 

It can never be overlooked by labor that the 
struggle in which it is engaged to obtain a full 
exercise of its rights is one running through the 
ages and yet but in part completed. Every step 
of its progress has been disputed by power in- 
trenched, not only in privilege but in the law, as 
pronounced by the courts. Almost invariably 



AND THE JUDICIAEY 89 

judges have personified the dominant social force 
of the time. In this country, the hope is not in 
vain, the final power is to be in its educated 
masses, enlightened as to common rights, faithful 
to broad conceptions of justice, with law-making 
sufficiently pliable to advance with progressive so- 
cial and economic conditions, and with courts and 
the people in mutual confidence. 



CHAPTER VL 

THE WAGE EARKERS AND THE MINIMUM WAGE FOR 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN.* 

He is no imaginary figure in industry, the fair- 
minded employer. His influence lias its weight 
with his fellow-capitalists, with labor organized or 
unorganized, and with the community in general, 
in times both of industrial peace and industrial 
disturbance. His appearance on the scene when- 
ever he has an opportunity to express his views 
and a hope to attain a conscientious purpose is 
regularly looked forward to with certainty by ex- 
perienced representatives of labor. He is at hand 
on occasions when employers are called on by 
employes to act like men. He may, it is true, in 
instances be over-sentimental, or animated with 
Utopian ideals, or perhaps a shade biased through 
some form of partisanship. But he has shown 
himself active, it may be ventured, in all reform 
groups in every country. He has been welcomed, 
and given lead, in radical working-class political 
movements, especially in Europe. He has allied 
himself with reform associations, political or 
otherwise, in every community. Frequently, in 
America, with the national pride in practicability, 
he avows himself simply a business man, deter- 
mined to act justly through policy, if from no 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 91 

higher motive. The truth is that the spirit of an- 
tagonism toward injustice is aroused in him as it 
is in the sincere spokesman for labor, the mind 
and heart of either carrying the man above nar- 
row, or class, considerations. The wage worker 
who has been chosen by his comrades as official 
defender of the rights of labor, himself perform- 
ing his duties from honorable motives, recognizes 
and welcomes sincerity, candor, and humanity 
when shown on the employers' side. And why not 
expect these qualities thus to come into play? With 
positions reversed, either representative employer 
or delegated wage worker, hearkening to the 
promptings of his spirit, cannot avoid, finally, 
within himself, hearing both sides, weighing testi- 
mony, ranging himself with the right, and, if no 
more than secretly, giving assent to his real con- 
victions. The wrench comes in permitting the 
inner man to speak out. It is one of the hopes of 
human nature that there are fair-minded employ- 
ers who, rejecting the special pleading of their 
class counsel, and braving the dangers of mistakes, 
choose to err, if at all, through experiment in new 
forms of justice, or generosity, or good-will, rather 
than to fortify themselves behind inflexible law, 
vague and time-worn economic maxims, or the 
traditional advantages of wealth as against mere 
labor. 

It is with the fair-minded employer that we can 
discuss with especial profit the more salient fea- 



92 THE WAGE EARNERS 

tures of this comparatively new question in the 
United States— minimum wages for women and 
children. 

This employer, on his part, and we, on ours, are 
to avoid the tactics of bellicose controversialists. 
Should he on some points decide to differ with us 
we are not to affront him with opprobrious epi- 
thets. As we proceed to outline the moderate 
form of the minimum wage to which at present we 
give our support, he will not, we feel sure, in his 
considerateness, flout us as ^^ trumpeting'' a new- 
fangled economic philanthropy, as advocating 
^ Apolitical cure-alls," as making a general applica- 
tion in all trades and callings of minimum wage 
laws, or as '^ neglecting the injunctions of the 
catechism. ' ' 

First, then, for what state of things, and for 
whom, is the minimum wage proposed? 

With this query arises before our soberest judg- 
ment the plaint of feeble, struggling poverty to 
society. Between the two extremes of the 
optimistic sociological expert's positive affirma- 
tion that ^ A never in the history of the world was 
labor better off" and the pessimistic sociological 
expert's equally confident assertion that ^^the 
masses of the wage workers earn insufficient to 
maintain themselves above some form of pau- 
perism," many shades of opinion are entertained 
on the subject. But, not losing ourselves in 
sweeping generalities, can we not, in forming our 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 93 

opinion, depend upon systematic investigations 
made in certain occupations by competent ob- 
servers, whose recorded reports bear the impress 
of truth, and decide also that conditions in similar 
grades of labor, as testified to by other inquirers, 
cannot be very different? 

Carefully made statements concerning the con- 
ditions of labor come to us in the ^^ surveys'^ of 
life taken in industrial centres, in the census 
tables, in the summaries of special investigators 
in selected occupations, in the official reports of 
trade unions and labor bureaus, and undoubtedly 
on occasions of labor disputes in the newspaper 
and magazine articles written by trained observ- 
ers required by their vigilant principals to give 
faithful reports of the events and conditions they 
have witnessed. We need not in these pages essay 
the task of detailed exposition of the generally 
accepted findings of these media of information 
with regard to certain categories of labor in 
America. If the many volumes in the ^^Eeport on 
Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in 
the United States,'' issued during the last three 
years, do not carry conviction that there is woful 
poverty and destitution in the ranks of these 
feebler workers, especially in the textile occupa- 
tions, among laundry and garment workers, in the 
glass industry, and in the grade of stores and 
factories employing mostly the young or less 
capable classes of hands, the conclusion must be 



94 THE WAGE EAENERS 

that the reader is proof against truths to him un- 
welcome. The pitiful level to which the mode of 
living among unskilled and helpless wage workers 
must fall in certain occupations is to be plainly 
seen when, as expressed in the Massachusetts 
^^ Report of the Commission on Minimum Wage 
Boards," ''the rate of wages depends to a large 
degree upon the personal equation of employers 
and upon the helplessness of their employes/^ It 
must be the desperate impoverishment of a whole 
class of workers that sends young boys to slate- 
picking at mines when the fact is known that ^^tlie 
average boy under sixteen years in a coal-breaker 
takes something over three times as much risk as 
the adult of losing his life.'' In 1911, thirty-eight 
boys and youths under age were killed by accident 
in the bituminous mines of Pennsylvania, and 
eighty-nine in the anthracite regions. So often 
have ^^home" workers in tenement districts of 
great cities been written up for the public, grown 
callous perhaps, that now, to prove that familiar 
abuses still exist, reproductions of photographs 
are printed with but a few lines of text — photo- 
graphs of single-room ^^ homes'' where the whole 
family, down to five-year-old little ones, ^^ break 
threads" for sewing machine operators, or 
^^knot" artificial feathers, or sew the tops of the 
legs and arms of dolls, ^^forty-eight for five 
cents," or pick nuts, a mother and two daughters 
of six and eight years earning together at this 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 95 

work three dollars a week. The mass strikes of 
recent years in the great cities have brought out 
startling testimony of the life-destroying priva- 
tions of a considerable percentage of the working- 
class population engaged in the industries affected. 
When we have the broad pictures of poverty drawn 
upon our minds by these and similar significant 
data, it would be an unnecessary repetition here 
to set forth the categorical bases of our argument 
through a mass of classified particulars. 

Employers in general to-day recognize the grav- 
ity-like tendency of wages to fall, especially in the 
sweated trades, which at times leads to strikes in 
the mass. Fair-minded employers, deploring it, 
show themselves willing to assist in obviating this 
tendency. They stand aside from the sort of capi- 
talists who in their business seek only dividends. 
But they are handicapped by the continuity of the 
conditions of employment that especially manifest 
themselves in the persistency of this trend down- 
ward. The demoralizing procedure repeats itself 
despite attempts to arrest it definitely. A great 
strike in an underpaid occupation having to an 
extent succeeded, unscrupulous employers at the 
earliest opportunity begin testing the labor mar- 
ket to ascertain its points of weakness. They 
break the trade agreement in one or another of its 
provisions, their harassed employes reluctant to 
quarrel. Competition thus begun spreads in the 
industry in proportion to the inability of the union 



96 THE WAGE EAENERS 

to fight. In time, often after a brief period of 
equal wages, the baleful conditions against which 
the wage workers struck are re-established. Fol- 
lowing a stage of miserable pay and long hours 
comes again renewed striking, with perhaps fail- 
ure for the employes, or if they succeed they win 
agreements only to see them broken in the first 
dull season by the same set of grasping employers 
who have always taken unfair advantage of their 
needs. This is the round of events in the wage 
struggle of the industry. Unfortunately, the or- 
ganization that carries on the striking is in cases 
unsubstantial. The cessation from work partakes 
in part the features of a strike, in part those of a 
revolt against society. In some occupations, 
again, there is little possibility of anything like a 
strike. In either case, in the unstable state of the 
unskilled labor market, the fair employer con- 
cerned is a chief sufferer. Among the last resort- 
ing to a lowered scale, he is among the first to help 
restore a living rate. Therefore, to-day, he is, 
with fitting determination, looking about for a 
scheme that may bring a regulator of wages for 
the protection of himself and his employes. Is he, 
or is he not, to find it in a minimum wage? 

We of the union side who advocate this mini- 
mum wage law are also seeking a supplementary 
wage regulator, to be employed for the two 
obviously defenseless classes, the women and the 
children in the lowest paid occupations, the same 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 97 

as unionists found supplementary to unionism a 
legal regulator of wages and hours for govern- 
ment employes. In studying a statutory minimum 
wage, we are willing to weigh duly any objections 
of opponents that have the appearance of validity. 
^^ Forcibly to regulate wages,'' we are warned, 
^^will destroy the basis of the right of contract 
upon which our present industrial civilization has 
been founded.'' But we must ask the critic who 
raises this argument to reflect upon the various 
spheres of social activity in which the regime of 
contract does not now prevail. Some forms of 
contract, he knows, are forbidden by the constitu- 
tion. No one may contract to commit or condone 
crime, or to establish slavery, even to enslave him- 
self. Employes of the government have by no 
means the same liberty of contract as other citi- 
zens. Contract is in notable respects not free to 
dependents on society. The actual legal status of 
all the minors in this republic is that they are 
primarily wards of the state. Parents may not 
abuse them, or neglect them, to their mental or 
moral detriment, or otherwise work them injury. 
The State imperatively imposes on parents the 
obligation to give their children a certain school- 
ing. It fixes an age below which minors may not 
be hired out to work. With women, also, the free 
play for contract is much less than with men. The 
Federal Supreme Court in handing down its de- 
cision in the Oregon ten-hour case, said that 



98 THE WAGE EAENEES 

woman ^^has been looked upon in the courts as 
needing special care, that her rights may be pre- 
served.'^ The argument of another court, that a 
woman must remain free to contract to work, in a 
factory, as many hours a day as she wills, was 
ruled unsound. 

Freedom of contract not being absolute, the 
question of its just or socially beneficial marginal 
line presents in practice a constant dilemma. All- 
comprehensive dogmatism here obviously fails. 
Principles, precedents, maxims are at variance. 
The actual marginal line shifts back or forth, rela- 
tively with prevailing opinion. This is governed 
by circumstances. As to the minimum wage, the 
query to-day becomes. Shall the state dictate, in 
peculiar but important circumstances, terms and 
conditions of service beyond those relating to 
hours, safety, sanitation, compensation for in- 
juries, and kindred phases of protection? — with 
respect to all of which the marginal line has in the 
course of industrial evolution been pushed further 
afield upon the domain of abstract liberty. 

Can any special reasons be offered by govern- 
ment for interfering in the rates of wages? To 
this, the reply may in part be arrived at by con- 
templating the effects upon the state (society 
organized for the purposes of government) in 
the case of wages insufficient to maintain wage 
earners independently of public assistance. 
Surely, if society is continuously to be called on to 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 99 

piece out the cost of the maintenance of a class of 
its members, it has a just and serious concern in 
all the conditions of the labor of that class. It 
might be better— at times assuredly would be bet- 
ter—to support entirely non-self-sustaining per- 
sons rather than to permit them, through their 
tmderpaid labor, at once to semi-pauperize them- 
selves and to put in jeopardy, through their de- 
structive competition, the wage-rates and, conse- 
quently, the well-being of their fellow-workers in 
general, who usually obtain a higher scale. Here, 
regarding its especial wards, the state, mindful 
above all of a defense of its own future, might 
prescribe extraordinary protective measures. 

We are asked to consider carefully, in objec- 
tion to the minimum wage, the fact that ^^at its 
recent convention the American Federation of 
Labor declared that a uniform legal scale of com- 
pensation for work and services would mean the 
abandonment of its fundamental principles, that 
workers own their labor power, and that they 
alone, acting as individuals or voluntary associa- 
tions, have the sole right to set the price and 
bargain for the same.'^ To this, in the union 
sense, we agree. The workers here referred to 
are, can in fact only be, able-bodied adult males — 
independent citizens, capable as a class of main- 
taining their rights and defending' their interests. 
The wardship of the law touches them lightly. 
Yet, exceptions exist to the principle enunciated 



100 THE WAGE EAENEES 

in the resolution. A desired rate of wages is 
enforced by statute on public works. In railroad 
and mining work, maximum legal hours are, in 
instances, prescribed. Militant labor in these 
cases adds to its own bargaining abilities the 
powers of the law. Moreover, were we to con- 
tinue argument on the point, attention would nec- 
essarily be given to that much-exploited tenet of 
non-unionism, the proposition that, in all circum- 
stances, a worker owns his own labor power, with 
the sole right to set its price. 

So much for basic principles. In practice, it is 
not a certainty that a legal minimum must tend to 
become a maximum. A legal rate of interest exists 
concurrently with a wide play in market rates, 
above as well as below the statutory percentage. 
The legal minimum of wage for child labor sends 
no young boys to work from the well-to-do classes. 
A low legal minimum of wages for locomotive 
engineers could not break down their present 
scale, though their ranks are open to non-union- 
ists. All union wages are the result, not of laws, 
but of the cohesive power of union members 
exerted in the labor market. Illustrations, these, 
of tendencies wherever there is strength more 
than counter-balancing the possibility of accepting 
the conditions of weakness. Moreover, if we are 
to take facts in lieu of prophecies, where the mini- 
mum wage has been tried it has had the effect 
generally of raising wages. In the ^* Outlook,'' 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 101 

January 11, 1913, in an article on ^^How a Mini- 
mum Wage Law Has Worked,'' these statements 
are made as to the statute in Australia : A tempo- 
rary provision when first enacted, it has been re- 
newed five times. ^^None of the predicted evils 
has followed the act. Employers as well as em- 
ployes welcome it. It has apparently not increased 
the cost of production, although it has increased 
wages. Efficiency, however, it has increased. It 
has not only reduced the number of those who are 
on the margin of dependency ; it has saved honest 
employers from dishonest and underhanded com- 
petition in arrangements with wage earners.'' 
There has been no ^ leveling down." 

Public attention has been called in the following 
words to my own views relative to wages and the 
American standard of living : ^ ' John Mitchell and 
other authorities put the annual family minimum 
living wage at $600 a year. The average family 
wage in Massachusetts is shown by the latest cen- 
sus to be $800, or $200 more than the necessary 
family wage accepted by economists." To pre- 
vent acceptance as a fact of this misquotation of 
what I said ten years ago on this point, I repeat, 
correctly, the part of the passage referred to 
which contained the thought now applicable to the 
minimum wage proposition (''Organized Labor," 
p. 118) : ^'In cities of over one hundred thousand, 
and especially in cities of over half a million, $600 
would, in my opinion, be insufficient to maintain 



102 THE WAGE EAENEES 

this standard for unskilled workingmen. '^ This 
estimate being behind the times by a decade, how 
much must be added to it through the increased 
cost of commodities meanwhile? The $800 aver- 
age of the census for Massachusetts, a level made 
high by the larger wages of the skilled and the 
well-placed workers, would fail to provide com- 
forts and savings for the unskilled in general in 
the cities, many of whom earn several hundred 
dollars less than the $800. 

In the course of an address on the new Massa- 
chusetts minimum wage law, one of its critics in- 
advertently makes two prophecies: (1) It will not 
be operative; (2) It will be operative, to the detri- 
ment of employers, employes, and the State. In- 
cidentally, this critic attributes to it the list of 
evils common in the minds of conservatives to all 
innovations in social regulation. Every infrac- 
tion of ancient economic rule, we long ago learned 
from the defenders of a settled society, is inquisi- 
torial, costly, impractical, unphilosophic, unchris- 
tian, ruinous to capital and destructive of labor's 
self-respect. But the present generation has in 
important matters often seen this set of argu- 
ments undone by time. Practice has disproved 
prophecy. 

Stability in the wage-rates of women and minors 
would eventually be a gain to all financially sound 
employers. Living wages would compel every 
industry to support its workers. Certain indus- 



AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 103 

tries escape that duty as their wage scales now 
are. 

A continually fluctuating labor market is a 
heavy burden on the fair employer in manufac- 
tures. He is menaced by the under-cutting of his 
wage-rates, by his rivals in business, by strikes of 
his employes, by the uncertainties of the future, 
by alterations in costs. His losses besides are 
those of a citizen obliged to help support those of 
his competitors not paying a living wage and 
whose employes are hence from time to time 
thrown on the community for assistance. 

We cannot but conclude that the fair employer 
must in the end agree with us on the desirability 
and feasibility of the minimum wage as here advo- 
cated. We have chosen to look at it much from his 
angle of vision, which presents the subject in a 
light not so readily caught from the purely labor 
side. In so doing, we have sought to collaborate 
with him to put bread in the mouths of underfed 
children and to remove sorrow and anxiety from 
the home of many a poor mother. 

A word to the good, but principle-bound, men 
who catch, as if seizing social safety devices, at 
such phrases as ^^ contract," ^ liberty," ^'a free 
market," ^^ mutual agreement," when speaking of 
the arrangement of terms for labor. There are 
few among them, we verily believe, who would not 
take to task, in some way, any neighbor known to 
them as an oppressor of the weak, an unmerciful 



104 THE WAGE EARNEES 

taskmaster to children, a cheat in the payment of 
his domestic servants. Such a man they would 
talk about, avoid, boycott, punish with zeal. They 
would unite in making an example of him. Why, 
then, cannot the community rightfully unite in 
simply exacting scant justice from an employer 
who is habitually guilty of all the acts mentioned? 
Not only of those acts, but of robbing the com- 
munity of a part of the means to maintain his 
business. 

An industry employing women and children 
which cannot afford, or which fails, to pay wages 
sufficiently high to enable them to live healthy and 
normal lives is a detriment, not a benefit, to society 
and should not be permitted to exist. 



m 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE WAGE EAENEKS AND THE TRUSTS. 

The trade unionist has his own special problems 
with regard to the trusts. To a degree he is nat- 
urally interested with all other citizens in watch- 
ing the steps being taken by the government with 
the avowed aim of dissolving them. As a con- 
sumer he has reason to study their effects on 
prices. As an investor, though not deeply con- 
cerned in them personally, he is aware of the bad 
effects on business caused by uncertainty as to 
their legality, their future, and the financial fate 
of their shareholders. As a fairly intelligent man 
of the twentieth century, he can have no deep-set 
aversion to that phase of the trust which relates 
to increased efficiency through improved forms of 
organization, or of management in buying and 
selling, or through adopting the latest machinery 
and the cheapest methods of transportation, for 
these features of production, as developed to their 
highest plane, are without doubt destined to be 
characteristic of the final order of society. But 
whatever his other relation to it may be, it is as a 
trade unionist that certain particular results of 
the trust problem affect him directly. One of these 
results has been that the trade union, of all the 
^^combinations'' of the day, was the first to be 



106 THE WAGE EAENERS 

brought to account under the Sherman act, once 
popular with reformers and intended by the gov- 
ernment to be the instrument for curbing the real 
trusts. Another has been the temporary weaken- 
ing of several national trade unions through sys- 
tematic machinations of the trusts on a scale not 
possible to any but multi-millionaire organiza- 
tions. 

The course of the series of events relating to the 
Sherman anti-trust act which ended in the convic- 
tion of trade unionists as the only malefactors 
under its operations up to nearly two decades 
after its passage, would serve to confirm the cyni- 
cal observation that under the law might makes 
right and that no matter whom a statute is aimed 
at, the laboring man is sure to be the one it 
strikes. 

It is the testimony of the officials of the Ameri- 
can Federation of Labor at headquarters, and of 
the labor legislative committeemen of that day, 
that in 1890, at the time of the passage of the 
Sherman act, it was understood that the proposed 
statute should not apply to the trade union. ' ' The 
bill in its first stages," states President Gompers, 
^^ contained a section affirmatively declaring that 
the organizations of working people instituted for 
the purpose of regulating wages, hours of labor, 
and conditions of employment, should not come 
under the operations of the proposed law." And 
when that section was under consideration in Con- 



AND THE TRUSTS 107 

gress Senator George of Mississippi and Senator 
Hoar of Massachusetts, in reply to inquiries, said 
that they were then satisfied that labor organiza- 
tions would not fall under the law, if enacted in 
that form. The bill, after being referred to a com- 
mittee, was reported back with the section 
dropped, but assurances were given by Senators 
Hoar, George, Blair, Sherman and others that or- 
ganized labor was not to come under the provis- 
ions of the statute. 

In the twenty-odd years since the law was 
passed, the trusts of manufacturers and business 
men have developed in this country as never be- 
fore. Not until within the last few years has the 
Sherman act seriously inconvenienced any of 
them. Even now, as matters stand, none of the 
trust-makers, as such, have gone to jail. Their 
punishment through the law has not destroyed 
their real powers of centralization, the source of 
their strength. The worst that is happening to 
any of the big combinations is ^^a readjustment 
of organization to conform to recent interpreta- 
tions of the Sherman law,'' or ^'a separation, 
through legal forms, of the offending corporation 
into its constituent parts.'' This, while public as- 
surance is given by an attorney of national repu- 
tation, who is a trust expert, that ^Hhe most ef- 
fective of all temporary price arrangements ' ' are 
reached ^^by barely more than a word or a sign" 
and are known as ^^gentlemen's agreements." 



108 THE WAGE EAENEES 

Those newspapers which are commonly regarded 
as representative of big business refer with mock 
respect to the Sherman statute when speaking of 
the dissolution of several of the trusts now taking 
place under its menace. The form of enforcing 
a law is there ; substance in the economic changes 
effected is lacking. ' ' The laws of trade cannot be 
over-ruled by Congress;'^ combination in form 
may be forbidden; ownership in fact cannot be 
prevented.'' It would be curious indeed if one 
man with a hundred millions might legally own an 
industry, and control its methods of production 
and distribution, while two men, as a trust, might 
not. So, all told, who expects real competition to 
be restored in the industries which in their opera- 
tions have approached monopolization? 

But toward labor organizations precedents have 
been established under the Sherman law which 
threaten to render it a weapon for their serious 
injury, unless new legislation comes to their aid. 
They are not in the business of production — ^buy- 
ing and selling materials, managing corporations, 
issuing stock, and getting charters from the gov- 
ernment. In no respect can they promote trade or 
restrain trade in the sense commonly applicable 
to trusts. An accurate discrimination in the em- 
ployment of the term ''combination,'' with its 
many-phased meanings, has prompted the British 
government to exempt explicitly the labor unions 



AND THE TRUSTS 109 

of the United Kingdom from the provisions of its 
law against combinations, an example followed by- 
Canada in its act to control and regulate those of 
that country. But a bill before our Congress to 
the same effect halts. Meantime, the power of our 
courts is invoked to hamper the trade unions. The 
United States Supreme Court has decided that a 
refusal by organized workmen to buy a particular 
firm's goods is a restraint of trade, as contem- 
plated by the Sherman law — a crime for which in- 
dividual workmen or associations of workmen 
may be fined and imprisoned — and the union hat- 
makers are wrestling in the mazes of the law, try- 
ing to avoid a fine imposed on them of $240,000, 
with fees and costs. A step further was taken by 
the courts in New Orleans when seventy-five work- 
men were indicted for withholding their labor in 
support of men on strike against a reduction of 
wages. A step still further has been attempted in 
New York through a suit brought by an employer 
against women of wealth for their humanitarian 
assistance to girls of the sweatshops while on 
strike. Will the next step be to order the dissolu- 
tion of offending unions? 

Eeally, the punishment the Sherman law is 
bringing upon the trusts can be quite fully de- 
scribed by telling what it is doing to the trade 
union, as the only ^Hrusf which cannot wriggle 
away from the act by hiring lawyers to rewrite its 
articles of incorporation. Only trade unionists 



110 THE WAGE EARNEES 

have been hurtfuUy penalized under the act, not- 
withstanding the obvious fact that the trade union 
has none of the characteristics essential to a trust 
—if the word is to bear a specific meaning. The 
trade union has not even papers of incorporation. 
It holds no franchise or charter, issued by a legis- 
lature. It possesses no legal privilege. It is pro- 
tected by no tariff. It cannot raise or lower prices 
of commodities, sell stocks in Wall street, adver- 
tise goods or bleed consumers. Its ^ ^monopoly of 
labor ' ' is true only as it is true that an individual 
has a monopoly of his own body, and of his own 
labor, when he is free. The trade union's mission 
is protective — of the poor, of the weaker ones in 
the economic struggle, of the men who have little 
more than their own labor and find the possessors 
of the wealth of the world in so many respects 
their masters, of the women tortured and often 
stricken through long hours and heavy burdens in 
the factory or business mart while their first place 
is in the home, of the children stunted in physical, 
moral, and mental growth through racking labor 
in their tender years. The trade union! Center 
of hope for millions, theater of countless and end- 
less acts of generosity; inculcator of the basic 
social virtues of courage, brotherhood, and self- 
sacrifice ; school, assimilator, inspirer of the penni- 
less immigrant, that common object of plunder; 
medium for genuine charitj^, uplifter to poverty, a 
positive help to humanity ! The labor union — the 



AND THE TRUSTS 111 

one black, foul, criminal trust whose members de- 
serve the stigma of a public disgrace, a sentence 
to imprisonment in jail! 

There is not another country on the face of the 
earth that has adopted the principle of the Sher- 
man law. There is not another country that has 
in all its code such a law to be used against the 
trade unions. There is not another country in 
which the real trusts have been able to carry on a 
campaign of displacement of union men with the 
assistance of laws professedly designed for the 
protection of labor. There is not another country 
whose captains of industry have employed foreign 
laborers by the million to break down the stand- 
ards of living among its own people. 

The steel trust, the tobacco trust, the flour trust, 
the beef trust, the leather trust, the anthra- 
cite coal trust — do they today pay the Amer- 
ican standard of wages to more than twenty 
per cent, of their laborers? The farce of 
the contract-labor law is seen in their hosts of 
immigrant employes. For many years it has 
not been worth while for the managers of any 
large industry to send abroad openly to make 
contracts with intending immigrants. The nec- 
essary trick is simple. A few laborers in their 
employ can on instigation summon by letter to 
this country all the laborers of their home vil- 
lages or communes who are disposed to emigrate, 
an intimation as to where work may be found 



112 THE WAGE EAENERS 

being sufficient. Or, the padrones and so-called 
intelligence bureaus of the larger cities, New 
York principally, are in position to import and 
distribute gangs of almost any number of men 
to any part of America. On these sources of 
common labor the trusts have drawn while pur- 
suing a plan on a comprehensive scope for cut- 
ting wages, for maintaining the twelve-hour 
shift, for depriving their workmen of the rights 
and powers exercised through the trade union. 
Toward the union, and consequently toward 
American labor and the European labor most 
nearly its equal in education and independent 
character, the trusts have applied the principle, 
carried out in their transactions in other 
respects, of buying in the cheapest markets and 
eliminating opposition. 

Temporarily, in some notable instances, this 
policy of the trusts toward labor has been par- 
tially successful. But it may now be confidently 
asserted that in adopting it they made a fatal 
mistake. Not only have they added force to the 
ugly antagonism which they are encountering on 
the part of the American common people, and 
made it more of a certainty that their contest for 
permanency will be the more costly to them and 
the more doubtful in its issue, but it may be 
prophesied that all their deliberate efforts to 
crush out trade unionism among their employes 
will come to naught. 



AND THE TEUSTS 113 

Each stage in the progress of the trade union 
in this country has seen its appropriate methods 
for promoting organization. At first, to form 
local unions and then combine them in em- 
bryonic district or national unions, volunteer 
missionaries as organizers and other officials, 
chiefly advanced the cause. Next, while allotting 
to volunteer effort its fitting sphere of duty, paid 
officials were employed, especially to conduct the 
organization of the growing national and inter- 
national unions. A step further was taken when 
commissioned organizers became a regular fac- 
tor of the unions, and assisted the international 
officers, together forming a corps equipped for 
their duties as men for a profession, familiar 
with the labor laws, experienced as negotiators 
with employers, acquainted with the markets for 
the output of industries, and accustomed to watch 
legislators. Another profitable step was estab- 
lishing a labor press, every industrial centre 
today having at least one union newspaper. In 
all, propaganda proceeding from these various 
sources brought the spirit of union labor into 
every community in the country. 

As a result, recruits no longer come to the 
unions only as individuals, each entering as a 
single convert and casting his lot with men per- 
haps unknown to him. The present process takes 
in men and women by the thousands. First 
spreads the general sentiment among the people 



114 THE WAGE EAENERS 

of an unorganized occupation that the union has 
a positive, necessary, and inevitable mission with 
the working-classes — and not in a far-off future. 
In looking to it for help, the workers see that 
they are depending upon themselves and their 
fellow-workers, and not upon Ladies Bountiful 
and Lords Charitable. Millions of other workers 
have obtained a foothold in freedom by asserting 
themselves in a body — ^why not they? 'Tis the 
truth, the living truth — act on it ! And moved by 
a common impulse, the incoherent multitude 
becomes an organic entity; in it isolation has 
given way to solidarity; brotherhood has re- 
placed egoism; it feels, thinks, and acts as one 
effective being, a division of society. So it was 
when the ten thousand Fifth avenue dressmakers 
walked out in September, 1911, when the forty, 
seventy, one hundred thousand shirtwaist mak- 
ers, garment workers, laborers in general of one 
city or another in the past two or three years 
took their first common step together, learning 
by it sufficient of the virtues of unionism to form 
an experience never to be forgotten. 

This remarkable and predictive social phenom- 
enon, a strike as nearly general to an industry 
as circumstances require, has of recent years 
repeatedly taken place in all the great industrial 
countries. Just as Sedan taught in war a lesson 
which military men say ought to have been ex- 
pounded in fact at Gettysburg — that a whole 



AND THE TEUSTS 115 

army may be captured — so one great strike after 
another is teaching the laboring masses in all 
countries the potentialities in the suspension of 
work covering an entire occupation, or, if occa- 
sion demands, even a larger social area. In this 
country, in 1902, the anthracite miners found the 
way, with 150,000 men ; in 1905-6, the typograph- 
ical union held its entire trade magnificently, 
with 50,000 highly skilled artisans ; in 1907-8, the 
railroad men, without a walk-out, showed the 
workableness of a nation-wide common stand, 
communicating, as they did, the fact to the rail- 
road managers that labor was not to bear the 
brunt of the burdens of the panic of 1907 and 
would accept no reduction in wages. In France, 
in the great strike two years ago of the railway, 
telegraph, and postoffice employes, the idea of in- 
dustrial solidarity was illustrated, recklessly. In 
Great Britain, in the summer of 1911, the absten- 
tion from work was just as large as had been 
predetermined by necessity. 

Colonies transplanted to America from darkest 
Europe do not remain benighted. Men who read 
the working-class periodicals printed in foreign 
languages say that of all the radical press in 
America, they are the most bitter. Their editors 
and the foreign labor leaders commonly preach 
the general strike. The most ungovernable and 
otherwise desperate strikers in America in recent 
years have been great bodies of non-unionists, 



116 THE WAGE EAENEES 

the larger proportion not speaking the English 
language. 

The game played by those manipulators of 
wealth by the hundreds of millions, those man- 
agers of scores of consolidated corporations, 
bent on setting laboring men by the tens of thou- 
sands in competition with one another, is fore- 
doomed to failure. The leaven of American inde- 
pendence and trade union sentiment is at work 
among their deceived and oppressed employes 
everywhere. The last illiterate bunch of muscles 
among them has been electrified by the repeated 
spectacle, here and abroad, of the mass facing 
fearlessly, and with overwhelming power, both 
master and class. Out of the confusion, the dis- 
sension, the competition of the great trusts^ 
laborers may come, at any opportune moment, a 
movement manifestive of a desire to profit by 
the example thus so often set them by others of 
their condition. Events have their direct, un- 
deviating logic. In every calling among the 
trust wage workers there is an imperative ne- 
cessity — both for themselves and for the common 
weal — of complete organization on a national 
scale. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

THE WAGE EAENEES Al^D UNEMPLOYMENT. 

When we consider that in an equitable and effi- 
cient organization of society there could be no 
unemployment, in the sense of capable wage- 
workers wanting work and being unable to find 
it, and then look at the amount of unemployment 
today in this country, we see injustice, ineffi- 
ciency, and neglect of our working people in the 
economic plan and make-up of our present 
society. 

The United States is the only great industrial 
country that has not taken up the problem of 
unemployment and endeavored to mitigate its 
deplorable effects. Neither the national govern- 
ment nor that of any State has any adequate or 
systematic means of ascertaining the number of 
unemployed at any given time in any community. 
With us in America the problem is exceptionally 
complicated, through the factor of an immigra- 
tion unknown to all other countries. Were we to 
adopt measures for the relief of the unemployed 
similar to those in practice either in Germany or 
Great Britain, and make no provision for ex- 
cluding immigrants from their operation, the 
risk would be encountered of simply providing 
better means than at present exist for distrib- 



118 THE WAGE EARNERS 

uting newly landed immigrants throughout onr 
country, to get work which might be done by 
labor already here. 

For a century this government possessed, in 
its unappropriated natural resources, an ever- 
reliable absorber of labor seeking employment. 
Those resources no longer perform that function 
directly, except in a limited degree. We have 
arrived at the state at which social action, in 
some form, must to an extent take the place of 
the individual effort which in the past could be 
depended upon in a land of opportunities, the 
principal of which, the free West, was contin- 
uously open. 

A Federal commission has reported that our 
labor market is overstocked, especially in the 
unskilled occupations. 

Such is our national situation with respect to 
employment, and its reverse, unemployment, 
viewed in its broadest scope and features. It is 
by this view that judgment on the question must 
be reached. If we permit ourselves to approach 
the subject merely as guided by personal expe- 
rience, or the interests of one element or another 
in the community, or the observations of inves- 
tigators who for any reason do not go on to the 
end of their work, we may arrive at imperfect 
conclusions. Some workingmen are rarely out 
of employment ; they are the strong, the capable, 
the energetic. If they look no further than their 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 119 

own experience, there is no such thing as unem- 
ployment. Unfortunately for the cause of truth, 
the fact is that many men, in and out of the wage- 
earning class, solve every social problem — to 
their own satisfaction — merely in the light of 
what they themselves have seen or gone through. 
Many employers cannot find workers when they 
want them; they consequently become irritated 
when told that much labor is idle and say that 
the reason for it is to be found in sloth. Employ- 
ers whose work fluctuates by seasons make widely 
known at the beginning of their live season their 
plaint of inability to find their complement of 
workers at short notice ; they send out no signals 
of distress, however, at the beginning of their 
dead season, when they dismiss all but a skeleton 
of their force. Social investigators may record 
such facts as that snow-shovelers in mid-winter 
are scarce, despite the cry of unemployment; 
they perhaps may not give due weight to the 
explanation that city out-of-works are indoor 
workers, unaccustomed to heavy muscular effort 
and unprovided with the personal outfit neces- 
sary for out-door labor in severe weather. 

No ; such narrow views are not sufficient. The 
subject can only be grasped nationally, or by 
large areas of the country and by taking into 
consideration besides the category of wage 
laborers, all sorts and conditions of men and 
women who offer their labor, manual or mental, 



120 THE WAGE EAENERS 

for compensation. If we so proceed we shall find 
in America a state of economic affairs relative 
to employment unlike that existing in any other 
country. It may be taken for granted that in no 
European country is there such a proportion as 
in the United States of fairly successful grand- 
fathers and fathers who, to their disappoint- 
ment, cannot find situations for their boys of the 
present generation, with prospects such as the 
elders enjoyed. The reorganization of industry 
and commerce of the last few decades has not 
left it so easy to mount the ladder of success 
from the lowest rung. Generally, the ladder for 
small enterprises is no longer there. What to 
do with their sons waiting for an opportunity is 
frequently a more anxious question with fairly 
well-to-do families than with people in compara- 
tively straitened circumstances. Proportion- 
ately, too, we have the largest number of pro- 
fessional men in the world — commonly in agree- 
ment on one point, that the country could well 
get along with fewer. On the other hand, 
elasticity in diminishing the effects of unemploy- 
ment among these classes exists in the possibili- 
ties of doubling up at home with the old folks or 
depending on the wife's income or labor. Hard 
times in business cuts down the migration from 
farm to town, postpones marriages, lessens the 
demand for large and expensive flats or houses, 
curtails personal outlay in many directions. It 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 121 

is a heart-breaking social process. The mortifica- 
tions, anxieties, even agonies, experienced by the 
people above public aid, as they resort to the 
shifts best known to their class in staving off 
stark poverty when their bread-winners are idle, 
in many cases quite equal the acute sufferings of 
the unemployed poor. Indeed, many of them who 
meet with reverses become acquainted with hun- 
ger itself. This phase of unemployment deserves 
recognition here inasmuch as it is to be doubted 
that the same class in foreign countries is so 
much in jeopardy from lack of occupation as in 
this country, changes in industry not being so 
great or so sudden and widespread as here. 
Moreover, the number of our men and women 
who during unemployment drop off from the 
ranks of the apparently prosperous, and are 
obliged to take their chances with the hard work- 
ing, is by no means inconsiderable. The bread 
lines and the lodging houses of the Bowery type 
have usually, by report, a large proportion of 
educated Americans, indicative of the number 
barely holding on at a grade a little higher up, 
living in deprivation. This class of sufferers 
from unemployment, while it strongly appeals to 
the observer sentimentally, is beyond the reach 
of direct state interference practically. The 
people in it can never be enumerated, classified as 
worthy or unworthy, placed under inspector- 
ship, or given places through labor bureaus. But 



122 THE WAGE EARNERS 

for all that, they form a noteworthy factor in the 
problem of unemployment, its causes, its loss to 
production, and its detriment to society. 

When we turn our attention to our artisans 
and laborers, we find them subject to certain 
causes for unemployment not usual in Europe. 
It is a settled policy with employers in some of 
our great industries not to give a full year's 
work to their employes, even where it might be 
done. The anthracite miners average less than 
two hundred days' work annually, whereas 
steady employment might be given a regular 
force in the industry for at least three hundred 
days. Suspension of work at mills and factories, 
in consequence of consolidation or with intention 
of union breaking, has characterized the steel, 
the textile and other industries. Our building 
trades in the North lose two months more in the 
winter season than do those of England. Such 
factors serve to render the subject more perplex- 
ing here than in the Old World. Other points of 
difference exist. We have no such loss to indus- 
try as that from the ^^ class" of young men on 
the Continent of Europe going each year into the 
army, and no such dubious gain as in the re-entry 
of the ^^ class'' returned to civil life, with the 
difficulties of putting the right men into the 
vacancies; we have no such question as is before 
England in connection with its numerous sea- 
faring men, nor several other countries with 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 123 

their illiterate masses, in cases reaching nearly 
50 per cent, of all the adult males. On the other 
hand, European countries have not our negro 
question, or an immigrant population, speaking 
diverse tongues. 

If we seek light on a remedy for our own 
unemployment problem by studying what has 
been done in the countries further advanced in 
dealing with the question for themselves, we can- 
not by any means be sure that their methods would 
meet a degree of success here corresponding with 
that attained by them elsewhere. 

The very first step in taking cognizance of 
unemployment as the object of a national reform 
through such means as labor exchanges, out-of- 
work relief, or similar administrative agencies 
necessitating supervision of the unemployed, is 
to ascertain approximately the number of people 
who might thus be reached, on the average, 
annually, in the course of the years. In the 
United States this is a far more difficult task 
than in any country in Europe. Area, the sparse 
settlement of vast districts, our sudden fluctua- 
tions in employment, besides the various nation- 
alities of the immigrants and the wandering 
habits of so many of our native wage earners — 
all these facts indicate so many obstacles to any- 
thing like a correct census. Any one may make 
his guess of the number out of work at a given 
time. The politicians among the ^^outs" always 



124 THE WAGE EAENEES 

have more unemployed in tlie country than the 
politicians among the ^4ns." Social revolu- 
tionists consistently see an enormous number of 
the idle and starving. The New York Labor 
Bureau publishes at stated periods a report bear- 
ing on the subject for the State, based largely on 
trade union returns, and not for the entire pop- 
ulation. These reports carry the observer some- 
what nearer the truth than might his own other- 
wise unsubstantiated estimate, but the bureau 
officials themselves do not ask the public to 
regard their figures as well founded statistics 
representing fully sifted facts. Their statements 
may run that 5 to 10 per cent, of the membership 
of certain trade unions were out of work at given 
dates, which may indicate the dull seasons in the 
trades reported rather than unemployment as a 
social phenomenon affecting laborers of all call- 
ings. The truth is bad enough at times, even 
after it has been proved that commonly accepted 
figures are inflated. The ^^ Bulletin of the Bureau 
of Labor'' (Federal) has on record the results 
of an inquiry made in 1878 when the Massachu- 
setts Bureau of Labor Statistics made two can- 
vasses of the State to ascertain the number of 
people out of employment. It had been reported 
that 40,000 were out in Boston, 200,000 to 300,000 
in Massachusetts, and 3,000,000 in the United 
States. The Bureau found 28,508 out in the State 
in June, and not more than 23,000 in November — 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 125 

skilled and unskilled, male and female. On this 
basis, the number out for the whole country 
would have been 460,000. Perhaps those who 
speak for the unemployed have grown cautious, 
but very recently the press quoted the worthy 
gentleman who is devoting his life to the cause 
of the unemployed, acting as president of an 
organization laboring in their behalf, as giving 
his estimate that in the summer of 1911 the num- 
ber was over 4,500,000. If, indeed, it was 1,000,- 
000 it signified a serious loss to the nation every 
day. If the number were but half a million in 
the class of laborers, there is still to be added the 
number in the classes not so denominated. Even 
when modified by persistent doubters and careful 
bureau statisticians, the number of the unem- 
ployed is sufficient to constitute a source of 
national anxiety. When we think of the misery 
of the man or woman dependent on wages being 
out of work, but willing and anxious to work, and 
reflect that perhaps today a million of persons 
are thus suffering, we must decide that of all the 
economic questions brought before society none 
is more serious than this. 

With the wage earners given steady employ- 
ment, at living wages, society might proceed to 
answer all the other problems of the human race 
in comparative peace and happiness. But this 
is a long stage beyond any yet sought by the 
nations that have given the problem of unemploy- 



126 THE WAGE EAENEES 

ment the most attention. They have gone no 
further than to try to keep the unemployed wage 
earners just about alive and to put them in con- 
nection with employers. In this work Germany 
has taken the lead, enabled to do so through her 
state systems of insuring and pensioning the 
laborers, of rendering aid through trade union 
and other voluntary administrations, and of 
maintaining labor bureaus and temporary lodg- 
ings for the unemployed. Great Britain is now 
in the fourth year of experimenting with a na- 
tional system of government labor bureaus, from 
which much was expected, as a step supple- 
mentary to old-age pensions, but which has been 
the subject of criticism by some of the trade 
unions. 

There is not space here to enter into a descrip- 
tion of Germany's interwoven methods of pro- 
tecting its laborers in the less gainful callings 
from extreme distress, but mention of its prin- 
cipal agencies will show their inapplicability as 
a whole in this country, at least for a long time, 
and the inadequacy of any of them separately 
from the rest. 

In Germany, every person under twenty-one 
years of age must have a ^^ labor book,'' which is 
held by the employer during employment and 
must be shown by an applicant when seeking 
work. When over twenty-one, all wage workers, 
fe:^cept a comparatively small number of the 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 127 

higher paid, carry insurance cards, there being 
at present about 18,000,000 persons insured. 
The card of each individual shows a record of 
his occupation, wages, health, insurance pay- 
ments, and other economic circumstances. This 
card he must produce when he takes a new job, 
applies at a labor exchange for work, asks his 
union for out-of-work payment, or seeks a lodg- 
ing in one of the municipal or union shelters. 
There are other cards, also, for the class of 
migratory laborers liable to become homeless 
tramps, who are subject to a system of police 
and organized philanthropic supervision which 
brings as nearly as possible all of them under a 
discipline from which it is difficult to escape a 
single day. Mendicancy renders one liable to 
arrest. In the light of these systems, one work- 
ing in with another, it may be seen why there is 
little begging in public and no nuisance of law- 
less vagrancy in Germany. But it would be a 
woful error, it must be said, to suppose there- 
fore that there is little poverty in the great Ger- 
man Empire. Much acute suffering from dire 
and hopeless poverty is prevented through the 
government's elaborate methods and a vigilance 
that never relaxes. Absolute starvation is rare, 
scientific prevention of disease is advancing, 
assistance reaches the poor from sources, public 
and private, not existing in America. But the 
statistics relating to relief reveal the degree to 



128 THE WAGE EAENEES 

which the masses still bear the burdens of 
deprivation. For instance, the number of persons 
obtaining temporary lodgings in a year in the 
^^ shelters'^ reaches two millions. Municipal out- 
of-work insurance^ of which much praise has been 
written in this country, seems a small matter to 
an American. The amount to be drawn may run 
about thirty cents a day for six weeks. But then, 
as to the whole system of pensions and sick in- 
surance, much the same comment is to be made. 
The amounts drawn, while on the whole an un- 
doubtedly important aid to the workers, signify 
only provision for the barest necessaries for 
existence. 

Enough is suggested in the foregoing facts to 
lead to the conclusion that just what German 
experience might teach us would be a matter for 
careful study. No example for our imitation lies 
on the surface of the German situation. No 
more is there any lesson for us in the outcome of 
either the British or French labor exchanges, 
with their utterly unlike methods, except a 
warning. 

It is to be seriously doubted whether our work- 
ing-class population in America can be helped 
much through the European point of view with 
regard to the wage workers. Of the three most 
obvious classifications of our laborers — the white 
American, the negro, and the foreign— the first 
class stands so far apart not only from the 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 129 

others, in economic condition and mental devel- 
opment, but from the European working-classes, 
that public measures of help adapted to the latter 
might not in the least degree be suitable to it. 
The American-bred wage worker does not wish to 
be the ward of any man or system — classified, 
numbered, tagged, and obliged to carry a card of 
identification, or be subject to police control and 
employing-class supervision. In fact, the Ameri- 
can wage worker who is the product of our gen- 
eral system of education is about the equal of his 
fellow-citizens and needs only the fair opportuni- 
ties promised in the principles of our republic to 
work out his own economic salvation. 

Safe conclusions to be derived from the reports 
of those public emploj^ment offices thus far estab- 
lished in the United States are that they are 
adapted principally to the needs of unskilled 
laborers and persons in domestic service and that 
their beneficial development might lie in facili- 
ties for making public the points where labor is 
in demand and for the movement of laborers on 
the land, especially in harvest seasons. In the 
industries and mining, the most pressing need 
exists for not only compensation for accidents 
but for inspection. How little the public here is 
prepared for such a network of labor exchanges 
and its accompanying institutions as cares for 
the unemployed in Germany, was illustrated by 
the history of New York's State labor bureau. 



130 THE WAGE EAENEES 

Established in 1896 as the beginning of a pro- 
posed system on the Continental plan, its work 
always of a feeble character, it was abolished in 
1906, a failure, the appropriation for it being 
turned over to additional factory inspection. 

Well, what can be done for our unemployed? 
Alas! it is, in the end, one of the deepest ques- 
tions confronting our government, our civiliza- 
tion, our social system. Immediately, in the 
United States, effective and to a point continuous 
relief to our overstocked labor market is to be 
found in persisting in American principles, under 
which the wage earner is an independent citizen, 
rather than in trying to follow European exam- 
ples, by which the wage earners are regarded as 
wards of society. The American system of giv- 
ing a citizen his rights and then letting him do 
for himself has not yet entirely broken down. 
What has broken down is the notion that America 
could be permanently a refuge for the oppressed 
and downtrodden of the whole world. An enor- 
mous practical relief to our wage workers would 
be given through governmental measures such as 
these: Eestriction of immigration, a steady de- 
velopment of the policy of reclamation, with 
new adaptations of our homestead law to the 
reclaimed lands, and persistency in the suppres- 
sion of legalized privileges. In such methods lie 
increased opportunity and decreased exploitation 
for the masses. Existing voluntary systems in 



AND UNEMPLOYMENT 131 

this country, such as trade union labor bureaus, 
advertisements of labor supply and demand 
through the press, and industrial insurance, are 
more advanced in promoting working-class in- 
terests than similar institutions in Europe. The 
American ^^way out'' would seem to be through 
seeking economic justice and improving volun- 
tary organizations and systems. A few dollars a 
month more in the form of wages to each wage 
worker in this country would excel both in social 
and monetary value all that the German wage 
earners obtain through their government's vast 
and complicated bureaucratic system of working- 
class relief. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE WAGE EARNERS AISTD PEISOX LABOR. 

**For a hundred long years organized labor 
has been waging a terribly one-sided war against 
the competition of convict labor." These are not 
the words of any labor official, nttered either in 
complaint or as a boast. They are set down as 
one of the findings of one who has investigated 
the convict contract labor system in this country. 

One-sided indeed has the conflict so often been 
that trade unionists in many States in which the 
pernicious system has been carried on have 
accepted the fact, as a matter of course, that 
obstacles to their attempts to abolish it should be 
the sentiments of the philanthropically inclined 
but short-sighted, the emotional utterances of 
persons reflecting an uninformed public opinion, 
and, naturally, the special pleadings to the pub- 
lic, accompanied by underhand machinations, of 
the two classes of men directly controlling the 
labor of the prisoners — namely, contractors and 
prison managers. 

What is assumed to be the criminal selfish- 
ness of the trade unionists in demanding for 
themselves the work performed by prisoners, the 
grievous wrong done to convicts in keeping them 
idle in their cells; the sufferings of their families 



AND PRISON LABOR 133 

when deprived of even the little wages they might 
earn during their terms of confinement, the cer- 
tainty of the convict falling into temptation when 
released at the end of his term without the pit- 
tance he might have saved if kept at work on 
wages, the serious injury to society caused by 
turning loose upon it annually hundreds or even 
thousands of desperately impoverished criminals 
ignorant of any means of making an honest liv- 
ing, whereas they might have been instructed in 
good trades while in prison — on these themes 
have been written editorials, sermons, political 
speeches, and college men's theses, until it might 
seem that on this question all the rest of the 
world were in unison against the trade unionists. 
This, however, was never really the fact. 
There has always been on the side of the union- 
ists a considerable body of men, many of them 
penologists, who had given sufficient study to the 
complicated subject of prison labor to be entitled 
to pronounce upon it a well-founded opinion. 
With time, this group has been steadily rein- 
forced by independent investigators and disin- 
terested readers of their reports. When, three 
and a half years ago, the National Committee on 
Prison Labor entered upon its work, it was 
found that its members were in practical agree- 
ment on the question with the trade unionists, 
that sentiment among active legislators and other 
public leaders had been changing as guided by a 



134 THE WAGE EAENERS 

knowledge of the subject, and that hopes to lift 
our prison labor systems up to a plane that would 
respond to the demands of the enlightened judg- 
ment of competent penologists were reasonably 
well founded. The present comparatively ad- 
vanced status of the movement to bring prison 
labor in America into accordance with methods 
approved by European authorities on the subject, 
may be attributed, in good part, to the views of 
the backwardness of our practices expressed by 
foreign delegates to the International Prison 
Congress held in Washington in 1910, The pres- 
ident of that congress said of America's prisons: 
^^In these jails it is hardly too much to say that 
many of the features linger which called forth 
the wrath and indignation of the great Howard 
at the end of the eighteenth century. ' ' The laws 
passed within the last few years at the sessions 
of a number of our State legislatures providing 
for changes in prison labor were in themselves 
admissions of sad deficiencies in the methods 
theretofore pursued. 

It may perhaps be said that at length the tide 
has turned and that the public is gradually com- 
ing to recognize the correctness of the position 
of the trade unionists with respect to prison 
labor. Assistance is coming to them in putting 
an end to a most unhappy situation, whether one 
considers factors in it which affect the prisoner, 
the free laborer, or the community. 



AND PEISON LABOR 135 

It is natural for the reader to ask why it can be 
affirmed positively that the trade unionists have 
been in the right on this question when so many 
other well-intentioned citizens who regarded 
themselves as well informed on public matters 
were in the wrong. The reply is that union men, 
especially those of certain occupations, on being 
for years brought constantly and intimately in 
contact with the economic and social conse- 
quences of contract prison labor, were driven by 
merciless necessity to find a just solution of the 
problem involved in it as a national disgrace and 
social injury. 

Iron molders, cigar-makers, boot and shoe 
makers, chair-makers and other furniture work- 
ers, shirt-makers and other garment workers, 
harness-makers and other leather goods work- 
ers, as well as wage earners in a goodly list of 
other indoor occupations, at one time or other 
in one State or other, during a long period have 
had driven home to them through contract prison 
labor a lesson in political economy which many 
good people not wage workers, viewing the ques- 
tion sentimentally rather than practically, could 
have little opportunity to learn. Only a faint 
impression may be gained when one reads in an 
encyclopedic work on abstract economics such a 
dictum as: ^^The price of the surplus of a com- 
modity in a market is the price of the entire 
stock,'' but a deep and lasting impression is re- 



136 THE WAGE EARNERS 

ceived, as from a knock-out blow, by a force of 
^^free'^ doUar-a-day girl shirt-waist makers when 
they are discharged because the goods turned out 
from their employer's factory cannot compete in 
market price with goods of the same kind pro- 
duced for a prison labor manufacturer by 
twenty-cents-a-day convicts. On this economic 
point, the New York Commissioner of Labor has 
thus quoted a shirt manufacturer: ^^All goods 
are sold by commercialism, and the lowest price 
makes the price for all as long as the cheaper 
article is on sale." In his report for 1910, the 
Commissioner of Labor of Missouri gives the 
idea clearly when he says: ^^A bad feature for 
the outside manufacturers is that convict goods 
can be and are sold to dealers and jobbers at 
figures slightly below their own. Therefore, it is 
very plain that all prison-made articles stand a 
better chance of selling first, and the demand 
must exceed this output before the jobbers and 
dealers can begin to handle the products of the 
regular tax-paying factories employing honest 
wage-earning men and women.'' 

In Missouri alone in 1909 the output of convict 
labor shops was valued at $4,708,102. Now, it is 
by far the lesser factor in the problem for that 
State that nearly seventeen hundred free indus- 
trial wage earners were in that year thrown out 
of work through the contract labor of that num- 
ber of prisoners, with a loss to free labor of 



AND PRISON LABOR 137 

$758,000 in wages, as computed by the Commis- 
sioner. The portentous factor to society was the 
demoralization of the markets through the 
prison-labor goods, with ruinous consequences to 
the free-labor manufacturers, necessitating low 
wages for their employes and perhaps the tempo- 
rary or even permanent closing of factories. 
When one remembers that the case of Missouri 
is the case of every State tolerating the convict 
contract system, in all twenty-nine two years 
ago, he may see the enormity of the wrong done 
in the United States to the wage workers who 
are not convicts and to the manufacturers who 
are not privileged to have their goods made by 
convicts in prison factories, with the advantages 
of free rent, power, and heat and an untaxed 
plant. 

Left to themselves, the free manufacturers in 
an industry can in a general way so conduct it 
as either to minimize the occasional waste from 
over-production or to overtake the market on the 
occurrence of a shortage in production. In the 
course of years they can maintain approximately 
an equilibrium of trade, resulting on the whole 
in fairly steady work for the wage earners and 
average gains to the investors in the business. 
But, to a number of industries, of all the circum- 
stances which vitiate the natural course of free 
production, prison labor has long been one of 
the most hurtful and vexatious. Fully thirty 



138 THE WAGE EARNEES 

years ago the stove manufacturers of New York, 
in petitioning the Legislature to do away with 
iron molding in Sing Sing, represented that as a 
body they could, if the State took its hands off 
them, provide for the average annual consump- 
tion of their goods at remunerative prices, with- 
out serious fluctuation in their scale of wages or 
their number of employes. Contract prison 
products, however, made the total output and its 
market prices ruinously uncertain. In New 
York, the contest between the two classes of 
metal manufacturers, free and prison, ran 
through decades. It was largely the efforts of 
the molders' union, associated with other labor 
organizations, which brought about the constitu- 
tional amendment of 1895, by which was intro- 
duced what is now known as the ^^ State use" 
system, putting an end in New York to contract 
prison labor. 

A barbarous social abuse certain to arise from 
the establishment of contract prison labor lies 
in securing the needed laborers. It would not 
do to have the contractors suffer through want 
of employes! A significant light was thrown on 
this phase of the subject in testimony given at 
Washington before a sub-committee of the House 
of Representatives three years ago, relative to a 
report of the Baltimore grand jury in January, 
1907. A passage in this report read: ^^ Owing 
to the high value of labor, we find the authorities 



AND PEISON LABOR 139 

of our penal institutions anxious for long-term 
prisoners, in order that their financial showing 
shall be improved and that they may get appro- 
priations for new buildings, on the ground of 
their being entirely or partially self-supporting. 
This is very commendable"! The Maryland 
penitentiary is one of the shirt trust factories! 
The process of legally putting poor and ignorant 
black men to work in the Southern mines as con- 
vict laborers has all the look of a villainous form 
of conscription: of 1,350 convicts in the Alabama 
mines on January 1, 1911, less than 10 per cent, 
were white. The writer referred to in the 
opening paragraph declares that of 2,591 
persons imprisoned in 1910 in the New Haven 
(Conn.) County JaU, fully 2,000 ^^had not 
committed any crime at all." Nearly 400 had 
been sentenced for a ^^ breach of the peace" 
(^^ street rows, family rows, clothes-line quarrels, 
and the like") ; 1,115 for drunkenness (^^for the 
most part convivials who had had one glass too 
many"); 187 for trespassing on railroad prop- 
erty (^^an offense which most of us have com- 
mitted in the course of a cross-country tramp") ; 
and 161 for vagrancy (^^ which means, as a rule, 
an unemployed workingman looking for a job"). 
The real purpose, the writer asserted, in con- 
fining these men in jail was to grind out profits 
for the prison contractor. The New Haven 
County Jail is one of the chair trust factories ! 



140 THE WAGE EAENEES 

How many men and women of the needle 
trades in the United States, it may be asked, 
have seen their jobs taken from them through 
prison labor — ^Jnst as the employes of four shirt 
factories in Baltimore, after the panic of 1907, 
were discharged, doomed to idleness, when the 
firm employing them transferred their sewing- 
machines to the Maryland Penitentiary, to give 
the prisoners work at full time? How many in- 
dustrial wage workers have seen the places of 
their employment close through their employer's 
inability to compete with a manufacturer work- 
ing convicts — just as was the case of a chair- 
making company which after thirty years in the 
business was forced to discontinue turning out a 
certain grade of goods made for it by free 
employes at $1.50 to $3.00 a day, in competition 
with convicts at 30 to 50 cents a day? How many 
poor, unfortunate blacks and whites have known 
while at work in prison or mine that they had 
been arrested, not to be punished as law- 
breakers, but to be worked for a combination of 
prison keepers and slave-driving prison labor 
contractors — just as may be the case today when- 
ever the temptation and the power exists for 
treacherous authority and unscrupulous greed to 
seize and exploit weakness and helplessness? 
Thousands, even tens of thousands of American 
citizens have in one or other of these ways been 
mercilessly and infamously robbed of their labor, 



AND PEISON LABOR 141 

of their time, either of which means so much of 
their very lives. All these sufferers had relatives, 
or friends, or fellow-workers who witnessed their 
cruel and unjust fate or heard the story of it, and 
these, with the victims, have no doubt wondered, 
in righteously rebellious spirit, where were law 
and justice and mercy and Christianity, while 
such shocking evils could be tolerated by society. 

Is there a confirmed criminal class in this 
country, skeptical of purity in the law and benefi- 
cence in its institutions? Is there a growing 
defiance of the public officials? Is there a wide- 
spread conviction among the lowly that to be 
poor is to be legitimate prey for cunning arch- 
thieves cloaked in legal authority or endowed 
with legal privileges, even to that of jailing the 
victims of poverty and working them like slaves? 

When one recalls to mind the enormous num- 
bers of poor people who have suflPered in some 
form from the blunders or the criminalities pos- 
sible under our prison labor systems, something 
of the answer to a perplexing question which 
law-abiding wage earners ask one another is sug- 
gested. The question is: Who are the mob- 
makers that suddenly appear in our cities in 
times of popular excitement? Who are the mis- 
sile throwers and violent shouters of incendiary 
phrases, usually imknown to the unionists, that 
during a lock-out or a strike make for the thick 
of the crowds, to act contrary to the wishes and 



142 THE WAGE EARNEES 

instructions of the union? To what extent may 
lawless outbreaks be due to the irrepressible 
sense of wrong done him by society rankling in 
the breast of here one man and there another, 
feeding the latent mob spirit, to flame up with 
the opportunity of manifesting it in public? It 
is to be remembered that on January 1, 1911, the 
total prison population of the United States was 
more than one hundred thousand, while the total 
number sent to prison in the course of the year 
1910, for short as well as long terms, was more 
than four hundred thousand. 

As to a highly promising, if not yet thorough, 
reform in prison labor, the principle has been 
applied in New York for fifteen years. Pursuant, 
as already mentioned, to the petitions of trade 
unionists and citizens who coincided with their 
plan, the Constitutional Convention of 1894 
adopted an amendment providing that only such 
goods should be made in the prisons as were to 
be used in the public institutions of the State and 
its subdivisions. The August, 1911, issue of the 
^^ Prison Labor Bulletin'' of the National Com- 
mittee on Prison Labor, in announcing a forth- 
coming complete report of the status of New 
York's prison industries, says it will show that 
under the ^^ State use" system the prison 
population cannot, even with greatly increased 
eflficiency, come anywhere near supplying the 
market which the law has thus provided for 



AND PRISON LABOR 143 

prison-made goods. In addition, at the Onon- 
daga Penitentiary, the stone quarry has been so 
developed as to supply sufficient work all the year 
round for the convicts there. 

Here we have methods for employing prison 
labor which have been shown through practice to 
be productive, as nearly as possible, of unmixed 
good — viz., manufacturing articles to be used in 
public institutions and breaking stones for road- 
making. Further, some States have successfully 
employed convicts in making roads. 

It is now generally agreed that convicts should 
be paid for their labor and that a part of their 
wages should go to their families. With these 
features, the New York program, supplemented 
by road-making, presents the leading requisites 
of an effective salutary scheme. Under it pris- 
oners may be self-sustaining, as presumably they 
were, on the whole, while at liberty. The suffer- 
ing of those dependent upon them may be allevi- 
ated through a part of their wages. The prison 
products do not disturb the markets, the effect of 
supplying the public institutions amounting only 
to a slight restriction of the selling field for cer- 
tain manufacturers. The factory wage-workers 
are not exposed to convict competition. The 
convicts may be kept steadily at work, while 
undergoing a helpful manual training. Limita- 
tions are set to the temptations, or opportunities, 
on the part of prison superintendents, wardens, 



144 THE WAGE EARNERS 

commissioners — of whatever title — for a vile and 
cowardly graft. Manufacturers operating their 
own plants are rid of a discreditable class of 
competitors. 

The change in public sentiment is indicated by 
the legislation on the prison labor problem in 
1911. No State in that year gave new powers of 
leasing or contracting for convict labor. Only 
one extended the field of its lessees. Twenty-one 
made some provision for State operation or 
assumption of industries. Eight provided for 
State consumption, six for regulation of prices 
and standardization of products and three for 
the branding of prison-made articles. Nine 
authorized road-making or road-stone crushing 
by convicts. Provision for radical changes in the 
methods of administration was made in seven 
States. The principle of relief for dependent 
families of prisoners was given some recognition. 
All told, a good start was made in the right 
direction. 

Organized labor, the most forceful social ele- 
ment in promoting these reforms, can welcome 
such opinions on prison labor as the following, 
given editorially in the employers' ^^ Mines and 
Minerals" for June, 1911: 

^^ There is no question but that convicts should 
be made to work, and at least earn their keep and 
the expense of maintaining the penal institu- 



AND PRISON LABOR 145 

tions, if the products of their labor do not enter 
into competition with those of free labor. There 
is a kind of work they can do, and it is work that 
interferes least with free labor. They can crack 
stone in the prison or jail yards, and this cracked 
stone can be effectually used to make, repair and 
keep in order the public roads. If each State 
would put its prisoners to such use, it would 
materially reduce the just complaints against 
our abominable roads; and besides, the privi- 
leges and rights of free, honest labor would be 
interfered with less than by any other work.^' 

It is true, with regard to prison labor, as of 
many another social problem, that in defending 
themselves trade unionists have been protecting 
not only the interests of non-unionists but of 
society in general. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE WAGE EAENEES— Ul^ION AND NON-UNION. 

With a population of a hundred millions under 
its flag, and a total area almost equaling that of 
Europe, the United States contains large 
districts, together with considerable strata of 
society in every district, in which non-unionism 
is the normal and natural condition of the family 
bread-winners. In our agricultural States and 
in the dependencies, wherever, in fact, the land- 
owner and the tiller of the soil are one, or even 
where the qualified tenant farmer is yet so rare 
as to be in demand, the principle of trade 
unionism invariably makes slow headway. Also, 
among many professional and commercial men 
who, though offering their labor for a hire, find it 
difficult to establish a common scale — the expecta- 
tions of each being to find himself some day in 
one of the highly prized places of his calling — the 
prevailing spirit is decidedly that of competition 
as against one another, though it may be that of 
combination against individuals not yet admitted 
to their ranks. Even members of the typical pro- 
fessional society or league who do not term their 
remuneration wages, but fees or salaries, are 
often unaware of having taken up with trade 



UNION AND NON-UNION 147 

union principles by organizing and have no 
sympathy with wage strikers. 

In the earlier days of our Republic, when agri- 
culture was the pursuit of three-fourths of the 
population, individual initiative, knowledge of 
one's calling, and the virtues of personal thrift 
were usually sufficient to bring at least a 
modicum of success. At a time when developing 
trade unionism was absorbing much public atten- 
tion in Great Britain, and being hailed by the 
working people there as an institution promising 
more for their material welfare than any other, 
Americans in general were as yet bestowing upon 
the organization of labor scarcely a passing 
thought. Remedies for low wages or non-employ- 
ment for our wage workers of that period were 
to go West, or to move from place to place, or 
to change from one occupation to another — in 
any event, to ^^ hustle," ^^ reach out,'' with faith 
in the abounding opportunities then existing in 
the new and rich land. The social spirit 
encouraged each man to launch out and do for 
himself. ^^I paddle my own canoe" was a pop- 
ular boast. The individual proved his manhood 
by getting ahead — which almost invariably 
meant shrewdness in amassing wealth, no matter 
by whom produced. The oldest of the trade 
unionists of this country can remember when the 
maxims which guided men to prosperity in busi- 
ness, or in election to office, or to prominence in 



148 THE WAGE EARNERS 

any walk of life, were those which imposed in- 
junctions npon each person to work for himself 
exclusively and avoid entangling alliances with 
others, especially with any of his weaker brethren. 
The youngest of our trade unionists may every 
day hear of people who believe that these maxims 
still hold good. 

Trade unionism in this country has had to 
make its way against what was undoubtedly the 
original American spirit — in business. All citi- 
zens, including the farmers, were assumed to be 
in business, producing and selling for themselves. 
If a man was not in business, he was, if made of 
good stuff, expected to be on the way, through 
working, skimping, and saving, to going into 
business, whether in agriculture, trade, manufac- 
turing, or a profession. To a self-made man who 
ardently held to this conception of society, which 
involves the principle that to be successful one 
must ^^rise," must be an employer, must show 
his superiority in acquisitiveness over his fel- 
lows, the proposition that there should be a wage- 
workers ' combination, possibly to be operative 
against himself, seemed almost a blasphemous 
breaking away from the moorings of accepted 
morality. Such a union was to his mind con- 
temptible, composed of an aggregation of fail- 
ures, a startling evidence of social degeneracy. 
Many men, self-made or made big through 
heredity, their dependents and those attached to 



UNION AND NON-UNION 149 

them by social ties, therefore felt it a bounden 
duty to stamp out trade unionism, to continue to 
uphold the ancient precepts that led to the suc- 
cess they had worshiped, to proclaim that the 
possession of property was evidence that the 
possessor was a mental giant, to hold that an 
employer's business entitled him to manage it — 
and the employes — as he willed. 

The opportunities existing in a rich, sparsely 
settled country, the emulation afforded in every 
community through the example of its self-made 
men, the social atmosphere in which adulation of 
the strong and independent was accepted as a 
phase of truth itself — these were factors giving 
nourishment to the spirit of non-unionism. 
Another, and a most notable, factor arose with 
the appearance of labor organization. It was 
made possible through the crudities in the form 
and operations of the first organizations and the 
natural blunders of their representatives — 
blunders which persist, on occasions, to the 
present time, when the organized are under an 
improved discipline. 

In the Old World the uprising of labor in any 
form through political parties or through trade 
organizations, could not be met by the arguments, 
springing from equality in voting or in material 
opportunity, which in this country once had in 
them some show of reason. In the thickly settled 
countries of Europe the masses have had few 



150 THE WAGE EARNEES 

opportunities, even in education; there has been 
no semblance of equality among the citizens, 
except as the poor were equally and miserably 
poor; the economists and other teachers of the 
public of Europe have therefore favored, rather 
than discouraged, labor organization. Non- 
unionism, with its wage workers, was never an 
normal or natural situation. Unionism, as soon 
as serfdom was actually put aside, was a logical 
outcome of working-class liberty. In America, 
on the other hand, the masses of white wage 
workers have passed from the stage of compara- 
tive economic freedom of forty years ago to a 
social stage approximating that of the industrial 
countries of Europe. Consequently, the area, 
social and geographical, for the American non- 
unionist has been contemporaneously narrowing. 
The premises for his reasoning, in self-defense 
or apology, have been gradually disappearing. 
His left-over maxims, fitting to a period of crude 
and mistaken individualism, are no longer appro- 
priate to the times. The lot of one man, year in 
and year out, in any of our great industries, is 
the lot of the mass — in nine cases in ten ; in nine- 
teen in twenty ; or in ninety-nine in one hundred. 
With few exceptions, the day for the industrial 
wage worker to study purely personal advantage, 
the over-reaching of his fellows, or promotion 
and finally partnership through race-horse strain 
and effort, has gone by. The mass of the workers 



UNION AND NON-UNION 151 

have covered the whole game of climbing up, on 
the shoulders of others, as taught in the circles 
which profit by it, with a full set of queries. A 
few of these are: iWhat proportion of us can 
possibly win the few glittering prizes ever dan- 
gled before the eyes of us all? Of what profit is 
it to the rest when one of us, or a score in a thou- 
sand, is set up above the others? Why should 
we not study, for the common betterment, the 
methods which will surely yield equal benefits to 
the entire brotherhood? While the hardships of 
daily experience have been divesting the wage- 
worker himself of the superstition that the condi- 
tions of half a century ago still survive as guides 
and bases for his hopes, his plans, his activities 
in getting along in the world, converting him from 
non-unionist to unionist, the theoretical territory 
of non-unionism — that is, individualism — still 
has strongholds in our courts and our colleges. 
The lawyer, dealing in precedents, and the pro- 
fessor, looking to history, are apt to see what 
was instead of what is. The wage worker, on the 
contrary, knows by contact with his tasks of job- 
hunting and job-holding what actual conditions 
are. Hence, while the college president-emeritus 
has praise for the non-unionist, the union worker 
regards him as usually unfaithful to his class, 
though granting that occasionally he may yet be 
a product of the conditions surviving in the side 
currents of agricultural or industrial life where 



152 THE WAGE EAENEES 

the general social situation of times gone by has 
been still to some extent perpetuated. 

In this survey of the origin and progress of 
the two sentiments — non-union and union, indi- 
vidual and co-operative — ^which in this country 
bear upon the organization of labor, we arrive at 
an understanding of the possibilities of honesty 
and principle animating men on either side. The 
judge on the bench may be acting in accordance 
with his lights, which are legal tomes, in render- 
ing judgments that are absurd when viewed from 
the standpoint of the spirit and social needs of 
today. The old-time college professor, a closet 
man, may be loyal to ideals of citizenship which 
were possible when his favorite authorities in 
sociology gave the world their heavy volumes. 
The college student, fresh from the farm or from 
the home of a professional or business man, may 
lightly play strike-breaker as a lark, or for the 
extra cash needed to pay his way to a diploma, 
not realizing his social crime, as seen by the 
organized workers. The journeyman worker 
coming from a country town may be but follow- 
ing the only custom of which he has had practical 
knowledge when he takes a job, left vacant by 
strikers, although this is nowadays a rare thing. 
The usual founts of knowledge and influence from 
which the plain people in small communities 
absorb their views of life and its obligations — as 



UNION AND NON-UNION 153 

represented by the school teacher, the village 
newspaper, the ^influential business man,'' or 
the speech-maker on patriotic occasions — are 
rarely engaged in the active propaganda of trade 
unionism. 

When, however, we mingle among the wage 
earners of the industrial centers, of the railroad 
world, of the mines, and the undertakings in gen- 
eral requiring workers in large numbers, we 
speedily find ourselves in a society by itself. It 
is living in close contact with the harsh facts of 
today; it is educated in branches of economics 
not usually emphasized in the college curriculum ; 
it is fighting the battle of the worker pushed hard 
by conditions of the live labor market; it is 
animated by a moral code which is the outcome 
of the necessity of its defensive warfare; it is 
busied in divers ways with advancing the welfare 
of not only the organized workers but of all — 
men, women and children — in the wage-working 
ranks. 

One is enabled to affirm, in sober earnest, that 
the sentiment of this wage-workers' society in 
the United States today is almost wholly union. 
The statistics of the present paid-up membership 
of the j^merican Federation of Labor, the rail- 
road brotherhoods, and the as yet unfederated 
unions show very nearly three million members. 
But this number does not express the sum total 
of unionists as it exists in fact. Unionism, in its 



154 



THE WAGE EARNEES 



ebb and flow, is made the more possible to a larger 
and larger number through union sentiment con- 
tinually preceding organization itself. Beyond 
the forces organized and paying dues to the 
unions are the masses that long to be with their 
comrades who are bearing the burdens of labor's 
uplift through union methods. A large propor- 
tion but await the opportune time to fall into line. 
In the progress of organization errors have been 
made which for a time have caused serious losses 
to the unions; there has been on occasion poor 
leadership ; unwise strikes have taken place. But, 
whatever the cause of their falling away, it may 
be confidently asserted that after men have once 
experienced the help of the union, never will they 
be again satisfied with the state of non-unionism. 
They know that most of the betterments they en- 
joy come to them, and are maintained, through 
the power of organized labor. Three millions, 
therefore, is too small a number for trade union- 
ism. If it were as easy for men to enroll them- 
selves in a union as in a political party, trade 
unionism in America would today count its four 
million — or five or six, whatever number is neces- 
sary to cover the vastly predominating force in 
all the trades and callings that have been covered 
by our modern industrialism. It is indeed true; 
trade unionism envelops in its folds more than 
are enrolled in the unions. 
When we begin an estimate of the number of 



UNION AND NON-UNION 155 

active non-union wage workers, we quickly come 
to a halt. Professional strike-breakers are not 
non-unionists. They are mercenaries, on hire to 
whoever pays them their price. Should the 
unions outbid the employers, they could buy the 
strike-breakers, whose principles have nothing to 
do with honest work. Their character is notori- 
ous ; the jest of the newspapers, the thorn in the 
side of employers, the worry and surprise of the 
innocent university leaders who once deemed non- 
unionists heroes. The steady and usually fair 
wage worker who at times refuses to come out on 
strike and give up his job may have yet in him 
the making of a true union man. He may be in- 
sufficiently educated, he may have had sore ex- 
periences with the pioneers of organization in his 
trade, he may feel that unnecessary sacrifices are 
being demanded of him and his shopmates; yet 
time may bring him around ready to perform any 
duty the good of his fellow-men requires. 

No workingman of principle can rest content 
outside organized labor unless he has not con- 
sidered the questions that its progress has evoked 
to society. What, for example, has non-unionism 
to offer in place of the insurance features of 
unionism? The answer is, mostly, some form of 
pauperism or mortifying dependence. But for 
unionism, would there exist a single State Labor 
Bureau in the country? Whence could be ob- 
tained the enormous body of facts recorded in the 



156 THE WAGE EARNEES 

bureau reports if not from them? How could 
trade agreements be reached, except through the 
unions? For, it is a certainty, non-unionism can- 
not promise a condition in which there would be 
no strikes. The ugliest of outbreaks are at times 
by non-union labor. "What would the prevailing 
workday be but for the unions? Have, or have 
they not, brought the eight-hour day to many of 
the trades? What as to the laws for the protec- 
tion of workers in mines, in the factories, on the 
railroads? Have non-unionists ever fought child 
labor? Under the heel of the tyrannical shop 
foreman, under the rigid rules of avaricious cor- 
porations, under the neglect of society, what 
would be the daily existence of the wage workers 
should they accept permanently the tenets of non- 
unionism? 

When such questions are troubling the con- 
science of the wage worker not enrolled in a 
labor organization, he finds himself going further 
in self-examination. Has he a right to remain 
standing aside from the men who are doing what 
they can for their fellows? Would he not be 
guilty of a form of treason to his fellow workers, 
and of short-sightedness respecting his own in- 
terests, in taking the place of a striker? The 
conditions of labor being what they are, is there 
any truth whatever in the claim that any wage- 
worker has the moral or social right to work how, 
when and where he pleases? No more has he 
than has a man a right to injure himself. 



UNION AND NON-UNION 157 

In among the workers, the non-unionist can 
offer no live argument for his beliefs, no moral 
principle in self-defense, no sentiment of brother- 
hood, no just reason for standing aloof from his 
fellows. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE WAGE EABNEES AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT. 

When, some time ago, public attention was di- 
rected to the women ^^core" makers in Massa- 
chusetts foundries, the necessity for the good 
oflSces of trade unions in the case was plainly seen 
by conservative editors and other public teachers 
who seldom have a good word for organized 
labor. They took it for granted that the unions 
were to be prominent among the organizations 
which should set about removing from American 
society the blemish existing in the spectacle of 
womanhood, degraded, as must needs be in the 
occupation in question, through the circumstances 
of work beyond the strength of the sex, of 
promiscuous workshop associations, and of un- 
conventional exposure of the person in the fierce 
heat of the foundry. Quarrel with the unions as 
they may, even the ^4ast ditchers'' among the ad- 
versaries of trade unionism must finally admit 
that the sentiments of the wage-earning class are 
entitled to a hearing, backed by an effective force, 
and that to obtain that hearing and to give it force 
the obvious essential is organization. In so far as 
concession on these points is made by opponents, 
they show themselves to be sympathizers with the 
union. They acknowledge it has a place in society. 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 159 

That such a sympathy and acknowledgment have a 
much firmer hold in the average stubborn employ- 
er 's heart and mind than he will admit, trade union 
officials are led to believe through their expe- 
rience as conferees in such matters as trade agree- 
ments and much legislation protective of the 
workers. A common observation among employ- 
ers who are pretty stiff fighters with the labor 
organizations among their employes is, ^^ Can- 
didly, if I were a wage worker I'd be a member 
of the union. ' ' 

This avowal is honest and human. It is equiv- 
alent to declaring that every one who is oppressed 
rightfully calls for fair 'plaj. This the wage- 
earner standing alone cannot get, as all employers 
are fully aware. Therefore, under some stress, 
the last biased one among them will express a 
willingness to comply with the rules of the game 
in the struggle for life and opportunity. Now, 
all games involving struggle are typified in the 
familiar illustration of the street fight between 
two urchins surrounded by a group of youthful 
spectators, who constitute themselves judge and 
jury. If the combatants are unequally pitted, the 
weaker must be given advantages in some form 
before the fight can go on. Whatever the varied 
interests of the lookers-on, all join in upholding 
the traditional rules, even those who have special 
reasons for taking sides, and the fighter who 
refuses to proceed under the general judgment of 



160 THE WAGE EAENERS 

right dealing is accounted unfair, and he loses his 
place in respectable society among boys. 

Hence it may with good reason be asked : iWho, 
in fact, does not sympathize with the organized 
labor movement? Who will say it is not called 
for by existing social conditions? Who does not 
know that the employer has the best of it over the 
wage earner who seeks work merely as one in an 
unorganized mass? Society on occasions may be 
vexed with the organized laborer ; it may at times 
regard him as unwise; it may, in its capacity as 
jury, pronounce against him should he strike a 
foul blow; but it would like to see removed the 
disadvantages under which labor is conducting its 
fight for a fair share in the fruits of the general 
toil. 

It can be safely laid down as an indisputable 
proposition that the nearer the systematic ob- 
server gets to the laborer, and the longer he 
studies the labor movement, the more lively are 
his sympathies with the laborer and the firmer 
are his convictions that, on the whole and all 
things considered, the labor movement of this 
country has done whatever good has come within 
its possibilities. It sometimes happens that social 
workers, fresh from their college books after being 
brought up in homes of the professional or busi- 
ness classes, find themselves acting on the erro- 
neous assumption that ^^ working people,'' indefi- 
nitely, need their ministrations. But they soon 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 161 

find that they have been theoretically studying, 
not the working classes but merely the statistics 
of exceptions, the reports of conditions among 
social strata not representative of wage workers 
in general, indeed, the state of affairs among the 
dependent and unsocialized. The novitiate social 
worker resembles in his inexperience those mem- 
bers of the police force who, in their daily famil- 
iarity with crime and their comparative isolation 
from normal life, are in danger of regarding all 
men as potentially criminal. But the social work- 
er 's calling gives him in time the practical advan- 
tages of getting close to the people, in their homes 
and at their work, and of studying their own spe- 
cial organizations. In the early stages of his 
studies at first hand he finds himself asking: 
What institution stands at the head in promoting 
the welfare of the wage earners ? Or, it may be 
the query is: How are they best helping them- 
selves, besides practicing individual thrift? He 
finds answer in such facts as these : The managers 
of philanthropic employment ofiices, of church 
benevolent societies, of eleemosynary agencies in 
general, are united in testifying to the care the 
trade unions extend to their own unemployed, 
necessitous, or sick members. The social worker 
thereupon feels that in doing such work on so 
large a scale the unions rightfully hold society as 
indebted to them. Pursuing his inquiries as to 



162 THE WAGE EARNEES 

■anionism further, he finds that in every direction 
in which amelioration of the lot of the worker is 
directly practicable, the unions are actively at 
work. As the voice of labor, they are naturally the 
chief reliance of the agents of the State and na- 
tional labor bureaus ; they have for decades been 
foremost in pressing upon the attention of legis- 
lators the necessity for laws protective of wage 
working women and children; they give life to 
these laws, to the benefit of even the non- 
unionists; they conduct their own schemes of in- 
surance ; they enter a field not touched by philan- 
thropy when they shrink the workday and expand 
the wage bill they present to the employer. The 
indebtedness of society to the unions thence 
becomes a theme in the writings of the social 
worker, as it is in the reports of the government 
agent, and of all other systematic observers, 
almost without exception. The trade union uplift 
of the wage earners is referred to in many pages 
in the volumes resulting from the Pittsburgh 
*^ survey.'' It has been an accepted commonplace 
fact in labor bureau reports. Eev. Dr. Washing- 
ton Gladden, of Columbus, gives his testimony 
upon it in a work recently issued. 

The casual reader unacquainted with either the 
reports of the unions or with other works of ref- 
erence on the subject of union help to members in 
misfortune, will doubtless feel that indefinite 
statement might be rendered more palpable 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 163 

through quotation of trustworthy figures. He can 
be obliged. For example, he may verify at almost 
any city public library, the statement that in the 
last ten years the trade unions of Great Britain 
have used their funds to the extent of twenty mil- 
lion dollars in relieving the distress of unemploy- 
ment. Unfortunately, in this country, many of our 
unions do not publish the statistics of the insur- 
ance or benevolent branches of their operations. 
However, in 1912, six out of sixty-nine interna- 
tional American Federation of Labor unions re- 
porting had expended out-of-work benefits to the 
amount of $215,398. Death benefits reported for 
1908 (round numbers being given for convenience) 
amounted to $1,257,000; 1909, $1,187,000; 1910, 
$1,320,000; 1911, $1,471,400. Sick benefits, 1908, 
$593,000; 1909, $731,000; 1910, $719,000; 1911, 
$818,000 ; 1912, $1,649,000. But how imperfectly the 
benevolent features of the unions are represented 
in these haphazard statistics is seen in the fact 
that they include no mention, for instance, of the 
expenditures by the International Typographical 
Union, in 1912, for the Union Printers' Home, 
$99,000; and for old-age pensions, $169,000;— 
these, besides the burial benefits of $32,000. 
These sums, for this union, do not include the 
outlay of local unions for supplemental death 
benefits, or of the local or workshop sick benefit 
societies, to which only union men are admitted. 
In 1912, the Typographical Union buried 655 mem- 



164 THE WAGE EAENERS 

bers, gave $5.00 a week as a pension to 1,038 mem- 
bers over 60 years of age, when out of work, and 
maintained 130 sick or aged members at the Union 
Printers ' Home. In the railroad brotherhoods, as 
is quite well known, the death and accident insur- 
ance features carry the reader to the considera- 
tion of enormous totals. In all, the mutual help 
of the trade unionists is on a scale so great, with 
results of such importance to society, that the 
question may with propriety be raised as to what 
would be the fate of our American working classes 
in the absence of this inseparable function of the 
unions. 

Nor have all the forms of trade union benevo- 
lence been mentioned. Seldom is there a union 
meeting held at which ^^the hat'^ is not passed 
around for a collection to serve a charitable pur- 
pose. On the union factory bulletin board is often 
posted a call for help for an unfortunate shop- 
mate. A sanitary committee, uncompensated, is 
no rare feature in a force of union men or women. 
Contributors to a shop sick fund take turns in 
personally attending on the sick or directing the 
burial of the dead. But — the uninformed inquirer 
will be prompted to ask — are not all these forms 
of mutual help easily possible also to non-union- 
ists ? To this the reply must be that they are not. 
Non-unionists rarely hold meetings, or have shop 
societies, or appoint committees. These features 
imply organization, which in any form is not 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 165 

encouraged by non-union employers. Even the 
occasional benefit associations of non-union em- 
ployes, which rest under the suspicion of possibly 
becoming the nucleus of striking labor organiza- 
tions, are usually managed under the rules and 
direction of the interested employers. The pen- 
sion features of the railroads and other large cor- 
porations, schemes to forestall union effort by 
binding the employe to his job, are economically a 
detriment to society in destroying the mobility of 
labor, in closing the labor market to men nearing 
a possible pension ago, aiid in tending to suppress 
the activities of trade unionism. On the latter 
point, however, the intentions of the schemers 
have in frequent cases been defeated, when the 
employes, loyal to their fellows rather than to the 
employers who have set the pension bait for them, 
have courageously adopted union methods. 

Whether this necessarily somewhat sketchy 
presentation of the purely humane side of trade 
unionism is suggestive of the truth may be 
verified, or contradicted, by a considerable num- 
ber of that profession which of recent years has 
seriously taken up a study of the labor movement. 
This is the ministry of the church. There was 
a period, which to the veterans of the labor move- 
ment seems hardly yet passed, when it was taken 
for granted that clergymen, from their education 
and associations and the habit of regarding alms- 
giving as including much if not the most that is in 



166 THE WAGE EARNERS 

charity, were unable to comprehend trade 
unionism. To the unionists fell the task of teach- 
ing the church the evil economic effects of its rep- 
resentatives finding, or providing, work for the 
needy at low wages, or for the young children of 
poor widows, or for the non-unionists who wanted 
the places that unionists had rejected. Earnest- 
ness in the study of social conditions under mod- 
ern industry has resulted in bringing the clergy, 
of whatever denomination, to accept labor organ- 
ization as a necessity of the times. In many cases 
ministers have first been attracted to the benevo- 
lent work of the unions, the set of facts therein 
presented touching the tender heart and not very 
profound conscientiousness that sees high merit In 
giving something to those in misfortune. The 
next step — more difficult, requiring broader ob- 
servation, clearer and closer thought, and a con- 
science keenly selective of social values — has come 
with time. Today, many of the denominations as 
such, and the prevailing opinion among clergymen 
as individuals, have pronounced for the unions. 
When Dr. Gladden in his latest work practically 
puts labor organization on trial and gives a ver- 
dict in its favor, when Rev. Charles Stelzle year 
by year issues his weekly letters in favor of the 
unions and regularly attends labor conventions, 
when Rabbi Wise delivers one of his glowing 
eulogiums on union labor, when Cardinal Gibbons 
advises people to refrain from purchasing the 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 167 

products of sweatshops, when a score of clergy- 
men stand ready in almost every community to 
write letters and articles for the union organs, 
when throughout the country on Labor Sunday 
from almost every pulpit a labor sermon is 
preached — when all these evidences of trade union 
recognition are manifested on the part of the 
clergy, it may be regarded as an accepted fact that 
the church is today emphatically on the side of 
union labor. 

Considering how serious a step is taken by de- 
liberative bodies of the church in giving formal 
approval to organizations not representative of 
their faith in each instance, the recognition given 
recently by such bodies to trade unionism forms 
a noteworthy sign of the times. While ordinarily 
the question of resolutions passed in conventions 
is matter to be glanced at as perfunctory expres- 
sion of stereotyped opinion, in this case of the 
church and the organized wage earners every 
word of each resolution possesses a peculiar force 
in significance. Every point in such recommenda- 
tions, it is to be remembered, was well weighed 
before adoption, every phrase subjected to criti- 
cism, and the step taken was fraught with good 
or baneful results for the convention, or synod, 
or council passing the resolutions. Hence it is not 
only with satisfaction but with the certainty of 
placing before the thoughtful reader an appeal 
to his convictions and a guide to his future atti- 



168 THE WAGE EAENEES 

tude on the labor problem, that the trade nmoii 
writer assembles the subjoined quotations. 

The following are resolutions adopted at the 
Tenth Annual Convention of the American Fed- 
eration of Catholic Societies, 1911 : 

^^We synipathize with every legitimate effort to 
obtain a living wage, reasonable hours, protec- 
tion of life and limb, workingmen's just compen- 
sation, decent and healthful conditions in the 
home, shop, mine, and factory and pledge our 
support to all legislative action instituted to this 
end. 

*VWe give our hearty endorsement to all unions 
in behalf of labor which are based on Christian 
principles. We appeal to the Christian leaders 
and membership of such organizations to foster 
and keep intact the conservative and just ideals 
for which trade unionism should always stand.*' 

The Congregational Brotherhood of America, 
through its Secretary for Labor and Social 
Service, in its leaflet ^'The Church, Opportunity 
and Eesources for Social Service, ' ' says : 

^^A strike may entail suffering upon thousands 
of people and untold hardship upon a whole com- 
munity, but there are conditions far worse than 
those caused by a strike. The labor union repre- 
sents the organized effort of a fine set of men 
standing for principles that are fundamental to 
the success and growth of our free institutions. 
The church ought to be able to see the heroism 
that will lead a man to throw down his tools and 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 169 

walk out of the shop, taking suffering and hard- 
ship for himself and family in order that he and 
his fellow-worker may have a fair wage, reason- 
able hours and decent conditions in the shop/^ 

The Episcopal Church, through its Association 
for the Advancement of Labor, has since 1887 been 
untiring in its efforts to bring together church 
members and trade unionists in promoting many 
of the purposes of the unions. The Methodist 
Church South has taken advanced social action 
against child labor. The Presbyterian Church, in 
its Department of Church and Labor, gives full 
recognition to trade union work. At the Eoches- 
ter convention, November 11-23, 1912, clergymen 
were present as fraternal delegates from the Fed- 
eral Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 
the American Federation of Catholic Societies, 
and the Church Association for the Advancement 
of Labor. In attendance at the weekly or monthly 
Central Labor Union meetings in perhaps a score 
of our larger cities are usually ministers of sev- 
eral denominations. 

The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ 
in America adopted the following as a part 
of a general statement of its attitude toward social 
and industrial questions: 

^^We deem it the duty of all Christian people 
to concern themselves directly with certain prac- 



170 THE WAGE EAENEES 

tical industrial problems. To ns it seems that 
the churches must stand — 

^^For equal rights and complete justice for all 
men in all stations of life. 

^ ' For the right of all men to the opportunity for 
self -maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and 
strongly safeguarded against encroachments of 
every kind. 

^^For the right of workers to some protection 
against the hardships often resulting from the 
swift crises of industrial change. 

^^For the principle of conciliation and arbitra- 
tion in industrial dissensions. 

^^For the protection of the worker from dan- 
gerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries, 
and mortality. 

^'For the abolition of child labor. 

^^For such regulation of the conditions of toil 
for women as shall safeguard the physical and 
moral health of the community. 

^^For the suppression of the sweating system. 

^^For the gradual and reasonable reduction of 
the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, 
and for that degree of leisure for all which is a 
condition of the highest human life. 

^^For a release from employment one day in 
seven. 

^^For a living wage as a minimum in every 
industry, and for the highest wage that each in- 
dustry can afford. 

^^For the most equitable division of the prod- 
ucts of industry that can ultimately be devised. 

*^For suitable provision for the old age of the 
workers and for those incapacitated by injury. 

^^For the abatement of poverty. 



AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 171 

*^To the toilers of America and to those who by 
organized effort are seeking to lift the crushing 
burdens of the poor, and to reduce the hardships 
and uphold the dignity of labor, this council sends 
the greeting of human brotherhood and the pledge 
of sympathy and of help in a cause which belongs 
to all who follow Christ. ' ' 

On mentally reviewing the hosts of sympa- 
thizers with labor organizations, and recalling 
numerous instances in which he has seen men and 
women of the well-to-do classes persuaded by the 
justice of the cause of organized labor to become 
among its supporters, the union representative 
may utter a word of warning to every opponent of 
trade unionism. It is, if you would remain its 
enemy, let the subject alone. It is dangerous to 
you. Some day, in a course of active opposition 
to the unions, you will surely begin to think your 
best thoughts and feel in accordance with your 
best manhood. You will put yourself in the 
unionist's place, see economic conditions as he 
sees them, and appreciate the preponderating 
facts in his life which have carried him over to 
his labor organization. You will sympathize with 
him, recognize the necessity of his work, and per- 
haps, as with the churchmen here cited before you, 
join in his praise. 



CHAPTER XIL 

THE WAGE EARNEES AND THE EMPLOYERS. 

The typical American employer, in exercising 
the common sense and business sagacity required 
in successful management and in achieving a 
desired reputation for fair-mindedness, avoids 
placing himself among those disputatious irrecon- 
cilables, the exceptions in his class, who refuse to 
recognize that their extreme anti-union views are 
out of date. Consequently, as the organization of 
labor has developed in this country, the bulk of the 
employers in one occupation after another have 
openly accepted the trade union as one of the in- 
evitable modern institutions — one which is an out- 
come of the new industrial conditions, a necessary 
refuge and creation of the wage workers, a legiti- 
mate order and body within our Republic, cover- 
ing a social territory lying beyond the dictator- 
ship of employing capital. The closing of that 
period in our industrial history in which the trade 
unions might possibly have been regarded by con- 
servative employers as yet awaiting honorable 
standing with other recognized beneficent institu- 
tions, ought to have been regarded by even them 
as arrived at the day that President Taft said: 
^^Time was when everybody who employed labor 
was opposed to the labor union; when it was re- 



AND THE EMPLOYEES 173 

garded as a menace. That time, I am glad to say, 
has largely passed away, and the man today who 
objects to the orgnization of labor should be rele- 
gated to the last century.'' 

Granted, President Taft did not explicitly set 
the seal of his approval on every feature that the 
trade union regards as essential to its functions. 
Nor do employers who recognize organized labor 
uniformly acquiesce with good grace in every 
union regulation, but taking broad views of life 
and of the perplexities in the general industrial 
situation, they have learned that on the whole the 
union brings both to the employing and the work- 
ing classes, as well as to the nation, results im- 
measurably better than the chaos of the labor 
market, the defenselessness of the wage workers, 
and the silencing of the voice of oppressed labor, 
where the masses are unorganized. 

Granted, also, that in general the industrial 
peace which exists between organized wage 
workers and their employers is recognized by both 
sides as really a phase of economic conflict; it is 
a truce, possible of indefinite duration, in which 
each has learned to respect the other. On both 
sides are men. Neither knows despot or serf. 
Both are included, to the extent of their trade 
contracts, in a wage-market democracy. The 
mutual attitude is far from indicating social ill- 
health. Both sides gain in the discipline conse- 
quent on learning through strife the wisdom of 



174 THE WAGE EARNERS 

conciliation, on seeing facts as shown on the other 
side of the shield, and on hearkening on occasions 
to warnings in public opinion. The mental horizon 
of both employer and emploj^e, in that situation 
becomes sujfficiently wide to permit of a clear 
survey of all the body of facts for and against 
either party. The organized wage earners and 
the organized employers may agree upon regard- 
ing each other as on different sides of the labor 
market, even, to an extent, as rivals in dividing 
the wealth they together produce, but they may 
yet have wisdom enough to stop short of declar- 
ing each other social enemies and showing them- 
selves animated with the bitterness of a mutual 
hate or bent on exterminating each other's organ- 
izations. 

Not in a spirit of rancor and recrimination 
would a congress of American employers and 
employes meet today if it were truly representa- 
tive — if, for example, it were composed of one 
wage-earning delegate from each of the railroad 
brotherhoods and one employer delegate from 
among the railroad managers closest to each of 
these, and also one delegate from each of the 113 
international unions in the American Federation 
of Labor and one from the employers of each cor- 
responding occupation. Such a congress might 
reasonably be expected to exhibit to the world a 
wealth of instructive experience, a healthy breadth 
of view and manly toleration, a habit of self-con- 



AND THE EMPLOYERS 175 

trol, a desire for a clear understanding of the 
differences in principle between the two great 
human elements in industry. In the course of the 
proceedings of such a deliberative body, it is cer- 
tain, the labor delegates would act under a sense 
of their grave responsibilities, while the ex- 
tremists among the employers would be obliged, 
through the prevailing opinion in their own num- 
bers, it can be believed, to drop from their case 
against unionism the sort of arguments certain 
radical attorneys and hasty-tempered officials who 
speak for the few belated and contentious employ- 
ers ' associations nowadays rely upon to mislead 
the public. 

What the latter can be truthfully charged with 
is narrowness, exaggeration in statement, lack of 
candor in argument, impracticability, and, withal, 
shortsightedness. They ignore, or at least give 
slight weight to, the fundamental economic causes 
for trade union principles and organization. They 
*^harp on one string/' presenting repeatedly in 
various forms their one set of partisan pleadings 
as if they thereby exhausted the whole subject at 
issue. Their task of trying to demolish the unions 
they carry on in terms of heat and hate, which 
usually betray misrepresentation. But, worse for 
them as business men, they fail to win their case 
before the public and they lose in their fight on 
unionism. 

Suppose that before a congress such as that 



176 THE WAGE EARNERS 

we have imagined a labor delegate were to make 
against one of the employers present the charges 
contained in the preceding paragraph. Could he 
substantiate them? Suppose he were to make 
them against Mr. John Kirby, Jr., president of 
the National Association of Manufacturers. 

To begin, Mr. Kirby has signally failed to defeat 
American unionism, which surely has been his 
purpose other than filling the air with plaint and 
denunciation. In one of his leaflets he expresses 
his desire to see the American Federation of 
Labor ^^as dead as a mackerel. '' In his inaugural 
address in 1909 he said: ^^ Today the life of the 
American Federation of Labor is hanging by a 
thread.'^ But the report of the secretary of the 
Federation for each year since that time shows an 
unprecedented increase in the paid-up member- 
ship, the total for 1912 — the largest yet reached — 
being 1,841,000. As an Irish delegate at a recent 
convention of the American Federation of Labor 
well said, Mr. Kirby ^s effort to disrupt the trade 
union movement was like the attempt to destroy 
the shamrocks of the Emerald Isle — the faster you 
plucked them the thicker they grew. 

In another leaflet Mr. Kirby announces: *^Why 
even the Canadian unions have repudiated the 
methods of the American Federation of Labor,'' 
quoting, in confirmation, a *^ Grand Council of 
Provincial Workingmen'' as deciding ^4n favor 
of cutting loose.'' But at the recent convention, 



AND THE EMPLOYEES 177 

as usual, Canada was fully represented, its dele- 
gates reporting unquestioned loyalty to the inter- 
national body. In other leaflets Mr. Kirby refers 
to the Buck's Stove and Eange Co.'s contest with 
union labor as if it were to be as uncompromising 
as his own. But the company is today on friendly 
terms with all the unions. He mentions approv- 
ingly a recent attack by ^^the Klnights of Labor'' 
on the American Federation of Labor. But at this 
showing of how hard pressed he must be for argu- 
ments, trade unionists merely smile and ask where 
those Knights are to be found. In another of Mr. 
Kirby 's leaflets, which contains his address on 
taking the presidency of the Manufacturers' As- 
sociation in 1909, he quotes a magazine in calling 
attention to the fact that in 1906 and 1907 the 
International Typographical Union spent three 
million dollars on its eight-hour strike, the article 
saying : ' ' They lost ground ' ' in the first of these 
two years and in the second ''threw into the same 
whirlpool," '^with a dogged tenacity of a man 
who does not know he is defeated," the sum so 
expended. But that eight-hour strike was com- 
pletely won. When it began the International 
Typographical Union had 46,000 members ; it has 
now 54,700. These have gotten back in increased 
wages since the strike was closed all the sums it 
cost the union, several times over, besides enjoy- 
ing the marked reduction of the workday. In most 
of his leaflets Mr. Kirby, in unmeasured terms, 



178 THE WAGE EAENERS 

attacks the National Civic Federation. But that 
organization gives no indication of being enfeebled 
thereby. Mr. Kirby in an address took the side 
of the employers against the shirt-waist strikers, 
citing with approval the dictum, ' ' The Waist and 
Dress Manufacturers will never sign any union 
agreements.'^ But they did, the last one among 
them. Mr. Kirby seems to regard his favorite 
assertion relative to the proportion of union wage- 
workers to all the workers of this country as one 
of his strongest points, for he prints it at least a 
score of times in his addresses and leaflets. In his 
^^Goal of the Labor Trust" he puts his figures 
thus: ^^The fact that a paltry 3i/^ per cent, of 
the workingmen of this country, embracing the 
militant, discordant, and disturbing element of 
society, should be permitted to dominate over in- 
dustrial and commercial affairs as they have done, 
is a disgrace to American business men and to 
American manhood." But where is the industrial 
employer who is making believe that he has access 
to a labor market in which, as Mr. Kirby else- 
where puts his proposition, *^3^ per cent, of the 
workers'' ^* coerce, intimidate, and brutally perse- 
cute the other 96% per cent?" Mr. Kirby 's state- 
ments of this kind — ^typical of the premises on 
which he makes his usual absurd deductions — 
could not arouse any interest among the employ- 
ers in the congress we have imagined, practical 
men as they would be. The bituminous mine oper- 



AND THE EMPLOYEES 179 

ators present would know full well that the pro- 
portion of union miners runs from 60 to 75 per 
cent, of the whole number; and the employing 
printers that more than 90 per cent, of the avail- 
able and competent compositors are union; even 
the waist and skirt manufacturers, in proper sea- 
son, are made aware that not even 31/2 per cent, 
of their employes are then non-union. Mr. Kirby 
would in vain point out to his fellow-employer 
delegates at the congress the millions of domestic 
servants, farm laborers, office clerks, and unorgan- 
ized casual workers as playing any part in the in- 
dustrial market in which they are commonly in- 
terested in obtaining their skilled employes. On 
these classes of workers the employers do not 
bestow a glance when choosing between union and 
non-union men, each for his particular industry. 
The momentous fact to industrial employers is 
that the unions master their respective divisions 
of the labor market and hold the labor in them on 
sale collectively. The unionists also speak for 
the non-unionists, who are unable to voice their 
own demands, either before the public, the legis- 
lative bodies, or the employers. 

A minor point in the estimate of delegates to a 
mixed congress discussing economics, and yet a 
matter of some consideration among American 
gentlemen, might be made against Mr. Kirby 
should a labor delegate quote specimens of the 
billingsgate he habitually employs in his peppery 



180 THE WAGE EARNEES 

^ ' literature ^ ^ ; " Loud-mouthed agitator and 
preacher of discontent" ; ^^ yelpings of such men" ; 
^' labor demagogue"; ^^ captured the Civic Feder- 
ation, body, boots and breeches"; ^^no organiza- 
tion of men, not excepting the Ku-Klux-Klan, the 
Mafia, or the Black Hand Society, has ever pro- 
duced such a record of barbarism"; ^^fake union 
promoters"; ^^ sinister threatenings of the labor 
trust"; ^^gab-fests"; ^^a fine bunch of reform- 
ers"; ''a reverend demagogue" (Mr. Stelzle). 
It was such phraseology that brought from Presi- 
dent-Emeritus Eliot of Harvard the suggestion, 
*^Your words would carry greater weight with the 
American people if they were somewhat less 
intense." 

Mr. Kirby would be asked to give names at 
once were he to assert before the congress we 
have imagined, what he has printed repeatedly in 
his association's leaflets, that ^^a man prominent 
in labor circles," said to him: ^^A labor union 
without violence is a joke," and that *^a Presi- 
dent of a labor union" said to him: ^^The only 
way to make a boss give us what we want is to tie 
him up in knots and beat hell out of the scabs 
who work for him." He would also be compelled 
to face the challenge of Samuel Gompers to pro- 
duce his proofs should he repeat his quotation 
attributing to Mr. Gompers the declaration on one 
occasion that he ^^is the master of a million 
minds." Mr. Kirby could also be set right, on 



AND THE EMPLOYEES 181 

the spot, were he to say, as in his leaflets, that, 
^^John Mitchell has expressed in the strongest 
language his contempt for the decisions of the 
courts and his refusal to obey them," and that 
^^Gompers, Mitchell and Morrison have openly 
defied the authority" of "the supreme judicial 
tribunal." As all men may know, the basis of 
these last assertions is the fact that organized 
labor has asked for a decision by the highest 
court on certain decrees of a lower court, which 
may be in error. But all such talk by Mr. Kirby 
is recognized as mere campaign perversion and 
distortion. 

Mr. Kirby 's spirit, the tone of his utterances, 
his manner in expressing himself, and the plane 
of his argument, all would fail to awaken favor- 
able response in a gathering of serious men repre- 
sentative of the two classes most closely interested 
in the social problems he has set out to solve in 
his fiery and dogmatic way. These men could not 
accept Mr. Kirby ^s presentation of the economic 
question of trade unionism as either correct or 
adequate. The traditional methods of blind par- 
tisanship — which, chiefly, are to minimize the 
discussion of principles, to avoid, if possible, 
agreement between disputants as to the funda- 
mental points at issue, and with wrath and fury 
to make the most of any weaknesses which may 
with even faint color of truth be fastened upon to 
discredit the other side — these are Mr. Kirby ^s 



182 THE WAGE EAENEES 

sole metliods. Fair-minded and intelligent repre- 
sentatives of his own class, acting under obliga- 
tions to their country, indeed, to civilized society, 
would promptly see through his tricks of putting 
his adversaries in a false position, discount his 
assertions, take his measure as an unfair pleader 
and a poor prophet and look elsewhere for a 
worthy champion. Indeed, in the actual course of 
events, that is what has taken place. 

What, justly and logically, is the order of argu- 
ment on the question of the trade union? 

Trade unionism is a natural consequence of the 
social conditions resulting from competition 
between wage-workers for employment. That is 
the primary, the basic, the comprehensive fact 
to be considered by every assemblage, every 
economic observer, every contestant on either 
side, when considering the question of organized 
labor. There is no other equally illuminating 
initial point for a discussion of the wage problem. 
That this is true is accepted as an indisputable 
commonplace wherever men of affairs face men 
of labor in arranging terms for labor in the 
market. 

Mr. Kirby's solution of the problem is that 
there must be no ^interference with the natural 
law of supply and demand.'' He would have the 
sellers of labor ever at the mercy of buyers, 
whereas the trade union would put sellers on an 
equal footing with the buyers. The depths of 



AND THE EMPLOYEES 183 

deprivation and despair to which the mass of 
wage earners may be carried by unrestricted com- 
petition among themselves for the boon of work 
has been illustrated the world over, times without 
number. The competing laborers have been tan- 
talized with a vicious circle of inapplicable or self- 
destructive palliatives for the persistent fact of 
general competition and its baneful effects. ^^Be 
thrifty'^ is a useless injunction either to the wage 
earners out of work or to those whose gains at 
best fail to secure the standard of living of civil- 
ized beings. ' ' Be competent. ' ' * * Be loyal to your 
employers." ^^Be quiet. '^ ^^ Distrust agitators.'^ 
All such admonitions have everywhere been 
listened to and followed by well-meaning, confid- 
ing, upright, industrious laborers, to find at last 
that while each in certain conditions may have its 
place in prudent conduct or wise self -guidance, all 
together — as in the case of the industrious, 
patient, self-denying, but starving sewing women 
— count for little in an overstocked wage market. 
When is the wage market overstocked? The 
answer is: Whenever a wage worker ^s employer 
can tell him to be oflP if dissatisfied, there's another 
man waiting for his job. That fact makes the 
employer the master. No individual in the mass 
of laborers can stand up for his own terms in 
employment when another, his equal, or anything 
like it, will accept lower terms. Moreover, the 
employer himself, whatever his just or generous 



184 THE WAGE EAENEES 

inclinations, is made to bend to the law of com- 
petition in labor when his rival reduces the cost 
of production through working his employes 
longer hours than he would exact or for smaller 
wages than he would wish to pay. 

Who does not know these truths? Who cannot 
see that in respect to the actual contact between 
the buyers and sellers of labor they are all-inclu- 
sive? Who has not seen them exemplified on a 
small scale as between two village shops or on a 
vast scale in mine, or iron-works, or railroad, 
employing thousands of workmen? Who does 
not know that they have formed the riddle of 
economists, the vexation of philanthropists, the 
problem of problems for statesmen, the torture of 
toilsome wage workers, the bases for the menace 
of social revolution? 

Trade unionists every day overcome Mr. 
Kirby's ^^ natural law of supply and demand" by 
a method equally natural. They refuse to sell 
their labor in competition. From the proposition 
that they shall not do so flow as corollaries the 
regulations by which the unionists forestall the 
buyers' methods of over-stocking or undermining 
the labor market. They justify their rules by the 
necessity of self-preservation for their union. 
Their organization is the instrument indispensable 
in attaining their purpose — a welfare of the work- 
ing classes impossible in a state of competition. 

No congress of employers and employed, if 



AND THE EMPLOYERS 185 

honestly setting out to face truth germane to their 
object, could possibly avoid debating this main 
principle of the labor question. They could never 
get away from it unanswered. All other phases 
of the subject are subsidiary to it. The character 
of the men in the labor movement, or of the men 
ambitious to be the champions among organized 
labor's enemies, is not pertinent to it. In a par- 
liament studying the labor problem, economics 
coming separately and first, the enforced com- 
petition of laborers must be the overshadowing 
matter for consideration. But Mr. Kirby and his 
kind ignore it. 

Why Mr. Kirby is conducting a losing fight is 
plainly to be seen. He has not won with the 
working classes, for the reason that all his argu- 
ments, when they come to the testing point, are 
but arguments for the restoration of competition 
in the labor market, and that condition is intol- 
erable because destructive to the workers. He has 
not won with the employing classes, for several 
reasons. The wise and experienced among them, 
equally with the union men, regard the drift of 
his talk — has he any doctrines? — as antiquated, 
impractical, detrimental to society. A large pro- 
portion of them do not share his feelings of misery 
and pain when judging of the outcome of unionism. 
On the contrary, they pronounce for the unions. 
They would rather go with the union's sympa- 
thizers — the churches, the women's clubs, the law- 



186 THE WAGE EAENEES 

makers, the organizations that strive for indus- 
trial agreement, all of which, in their turn, 
Mr. Kirby has rabidly denounced — than the way 
Mr. Kirby has chosen, the way of ceaseless con- 
flict, hard feeling, hysterical lamentation, and 
foredoomed defeat. 



1 



MAY 22 1913 



